ROOTS & BRANCHES

Genealogy has been a fairly large part of my identity for the last 40 years, but I still think it’s interesting the responses I get when I introduce myself as having a business “doing genealogy; that is, family trees.”

So, herewith are the top 10 replies I get to that introduction:

10. “Oh, it must be fascinating dealing with rocks.” (Don’t get this anymore once I added “that is, family trees” part)

9. “I tried that once, but I didn’t get very far.” This is often a person’s way of letting me know to change the topic—that they’re simply not interested, which in turn can be my cue to find a new person with which to talk.

8. “Oh, are you available for hire?” A professional genealogist likes a question such as this, but sometimes it leads to the next follow up about prices.

7. “Wait, it would cost that much?” (Which is why I don’t do that much research for hire in my business, as opposed to lecturing and writing)

6. “But what can you find out?” This is a real conversation starter since it literally had no answer and everything as an answer. Every genealogy search is different—each ancestor has a different time frame and often a different geographic place and these items are the nexus of how much information can be obtained.

5. “That must be really boring.” Truth be told, that was a one-time response to me saying that I was going to spend a week at a genealogy conference. More truth be told, it was on a first date. Do I even need to say there wasn’t a second date?

4. “Oh, are you at all related to the Beidler House?” This is another singleton, but a happier one since I was able to tell the person inquiring that, yes, I’m a fifth-great-grandson of the builder of the Beidler House about which he was talking.

3. “Oh, my grandmother did everything for the family years ago.” Sometimes I’m a little skeptical of this. Other times I’m more than a little skeptical.

2. “Have you finished your own tree?” As if that’s even possible!

1. Finally, of course, there’s: “Oh, yeah, I took the DNA test and it turns out I’m Scottish.”

Sometimes that’s the end of the conversation. And sometimes it’s the beginning, depending how fixed the person seems with that information.

That’s because our understanding of ethnic DNA continues to evolve, and therefore our ethnicities often evolve with that! When the major DNA outfits such as Ancestry.com do “updates” to the bits of DNA that they use to represent the various ethnicities, the percentages they claim we are change, too.