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I am doing Genealogy as a hobby and in most of the lines I am in the 18the century, in some in the 17th century.
What I learned during this hobby is a simple thing - the more generations you go back, the more ancestors you have - the formula is 2^n. So if you go back 10 generations, you have roughly 1,024 ancestors.
Now imagine how many descendants these people have? I have met plenty of others nerds who are also doing genealogy, cousins by 7the grade and so on. There is always some dude doing this stuff, so I am pretty sure there will be one in the future.
Of course I can only go back about 300-350 years, but we people today are leaving way more traces on this planet than my ancestors in the 17th century.
This breaks down eventually. Eventually, incest.
That's why I said roughly. The genealogical concept behind this is Ahnenschwund or pedigree collapse.
Fair enough. I just wanted to make an incest joke
I have a geneology book dating back 20 generations. Its all in tradition chinese and kinda blurry and I kinda never learned most of the charcters besides the basics. But I skimmed it and aparantly it dates back to 1200s. A lot of mention about emperors and stuff. Unfortunately I can't share it with y'all since that's kinda doxxing and I posted too much political stuff on Lemmy.
It's only the male ancestors, patriarchy and all, ya know.
Honestly, besides the snippets if history, I don't know what the point of the whole name lists is. Can't even find the aunts on there, what good is that for.
Like... there's not even a portrait (like a hand drawn one), just a bunch of names. What, am I gonna use that inherit some long lost magical kingdom that's gonna appear out of nowhere? Am I the Dragonborn? No lolz. I can't understand "tradition"
I guess its cool for declorations, make the house look ancient and mysterious?
The original is alresdy falling apart lol (probably not the original original, probably copied at least 5 times already, no way it survived 800 years), then all the genology books in the village kinda got consolidated into one big one containing all households. Everyone in the village has the same last name (I think). Y'all get to have sex in highschool, back in the days, people didn't get to choose, my parents kinda just got introduced to each other and they wete pressured to marry. Its technically consensual, but if they reject, they are just gonna introduce you to someone else. Kinda reminds me of the beginning of House of Dragon (except the part about being royalty of course, we are all just ordinary people). And my parents yell at each other a lot, kinda a fragile marriage... 🤷♂️
That is pretty impressive!
So let me explain what my motivation is... I am not so much interested in origin. I don't feel any connection to the ancestors I do not know, which starts with my great grandparents. I don't even know my grant parents, however, there is a bound through my parents, who were brought up by them. So their character, how they see their world etc. is influenced by my grand parents.
Now, this is limited to my grand parents, we are speaking of a period of roughly 100 years. What about the ancestors before that time? My family tree is mostly made out of dates like you said, baptisms, marriages, deaths. A huge list of more or less random people that have nothing to do with me.
However, I am using these people to tap into the historical contexts they were born in.
My family is entirely made out of day laborers in Germany. There are a few masons, but most of them day laborers, the lowest class you can imagine. Usually, when you study history, you are looking through a certain perspective. In Germany this will most likely be counts and dukes, aristocracy, wars, territories etc. - but not so much about the poor people. My genealogical research is basically opening a new window for me, to view history from another perspective. I collected an extensive collection of literature about the weirdest little villages and stories you would never even have heard of, if you'd just follow the "traditional" way like history is taught in schools.
I hope this explains it a bit!