by James Wallace Harris, 1/6/25
I joined Ancestry.com so I could upload old family photos. I thought they should be saved somewhere because all my family photos will be thrown away after I die. Many of my photographs have already been converted into digital files, so I figured it would only require looking up the person and uploading the files for that person.
Because the government knows so much about us, I assumed that kinship relationships for the last three or four generations would already be in the Ancestry.com system. That was a big false assumption.
Ancestry.com claims to have over 60 billion records. I don’t know if that’s 60 billion different pieces of paper or 60 billion references to individuals. The trick using Ancestry.com is to start with a name and then use all its records to verify the identity of each person. It’s not easy. You can’t trust any one record. You need to find several records with connecting information that’s already been previously validated.
My assumption was recent family members would be known and family from the past would be harder to identify. It turned out that parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents are hard to verify but once I did, Ancestry.com offered a lot of hints about my great-grandparents, and their ancestors. However, the hints need to be verified. Those hints are probably based on distant relatives in the past, working up family trees, and those trees might not be accurate.
I was shocked by how many people have similar names, with similar dates of birth and death, coming from the same part of the country. I could very easily add photos of people who were not the people photographed.
Before I joined Ancestry.com and used it, I thought family trees were already well established, and I could quickly upload all my family photos. That won’t be the case.
Just to cover my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, I’ll need to research and identify 30 people. I only knew four of them. If I go back to another generation, that would add 32 more people. This completely ignores aunts, uncles, and cousins from each generation. Adding them to my family three would mean researching another hundred people, maybe two hundred.
Another assumption I had before working with Ancestry.com was the belief that building a family tree would help me get to know my ancestors. It hasn’t worked out that way. Finding names and dates to add to my tree reveals nothing about those people.
Genealogy is interesting and even educational. It’s revealing in unexpected ways. It shows that blood is not thicker than water. Kinship is meaningless. Actual interactions with each other are everything.
I’m not sure if saving my photographs will be of any real value. I’ll save them anyway, but I’m uncertain if anyone will care. Now I understand why so many people I’ve talked to about this project said they had zero interest in genealogy. They instinctively knew that people they never met were just meaningless names and dates on a chart
However, learning genealogy offers other rewards. It teaches research skills. It reveals how society knows and remembers people. Pursuing genealogy shows the limits of identity and identification. Unless a person is worthy of a biography, history only knows us by our names, marriages, addresses, birthdates, and death dates. And don’t those details say absolutely nothing about true selves?
Maybe I’m wrong. As I dig into the past, maybe I’ll find revelations I never expected.
By the way, genealogy should benefit greatly from AI.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Hi James, and happy New Year!
I’ve been doing genealogy for over 50 years as a hobby. More so in the last 6 years since retirement.
Your comment about… “it teaches research skills”…just about covers 90% of it. Research and verification are critical to any success or satisfaction with the craft. The beauty of genealogy today is that you can do it online. Mostly gone are the days when folks had to pay someone to sit in public archives and the like. I do visit the occasional archive for a particular piece of info that I couldn’t find an answer to, however the vast majority of time is spent online given that Genealogy sites have invested heavily in competing for subscription money.
The key is verification. One cannot take anything online at face value. On your quest for photographs,…this, in my experience is the least available resource to find. Verification of a photograph is the even harder as there are no data points in which to verify.
When I have time I will reach out to tree owners and point out obvious errors.
Good luck with your research!
p.s….don’t forget to eat and get some sleep! lol,…and check-in with your closest other once in awhile!
A free one and a good one strictly for lineage, is the one offered by the Latter Day Saints or the Mormon Church. 23 and me, I heard is going out of business. If you want the DNA stuff, the Ancestry has that. I did a sample with them sometime ago. Not sure if it was worth it..
I do like genealogy but you can only go so far until it becomes speculative. I’ve lost a bit of interest and since only my 2 brothers had children and grands and they aren’t the least bit interested..kinda like what’s the point.
Kids today dont care about any of it
James I should have included in my comments that using the Latter Day Saints LDS products is a wiser option. Because of their religious background of family research they take it more seriously and without the commercial aspect. I use their Legacy (free or next to nothing if I recall) to store my database of family and portrait type photos, certificates etc. (includes a family tree) and their free search program FamilySearch (similar to Ancestry) for searching masses of govt records (excluding the ones Ancestry have bought). If and when you are comfortable you can post your family tree either for public or private use. My local history library gives me free access to Ancestry for the data that they ‘own’. I’m working on building stories into our ancestors so it is interesting to read about the times they lived in. I’m becoming a bit of a history nerd thanks to genealogy. Treat it as a fun project and you’ll have a ball. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the sincerity of LDS just Google ‘granite mountain vault’. If you want to dip your toe in the water and have any questions feel free to email me at itchingforhitching@gmail.com. Cheers Lindsey. BTW so far I’ve found that grandfather was born in a workhouse and nanna’s sweet sister was a bigamist!