Genealogy

On my fathers side I can trace my direct ancestry back almost a thousand years. On my mothers side we have a family genealogist and I can only trace my family back into the 1800's.


Genealogy is an interesting subject and lots of people have really strange opinions on the subject.


My first ancestor in the United States was John Ayer and he is often confused with his own son, John Ayer.


I once tried to start filling out a genealogy website on line and some idiot who confused the two changed the genealogy.  To be fair, the idiot didn't do any real research, he just copied a mistake another researcher made when they confused John Ayer and John Ayer, understanding that they were two different people and not understanding the relationship. The son was known as “Captain John Ayer” because he was the “Greatest Indian Killer in Massachusetts” and in some records the father is called mistakenly called “Captain John Ayer. On top of that John-2 married a woman named Sarah and his son John-3 married a woman named Sarah.  John-2 had a daughter hanged for witchcraft and that created some issues where the family attempted to distance itself from the situation.

Unless someone actually does research people get very confused about these three generations. Since this no-research jerk was just being a jerk who did squat for research and ruined something I spent time on I quit wasting my time on something some jerk would just come by and change so that it was wrong.


That is one of biggest the problems with people, they do crap research and think they know enough to spew their idiocy out into the world, while they ridicule others from their self aggrandized positions.


If people understood how really ignorant they are things like this wouldn't happen very often, but, they do.  Because people are ignorant.

Genealogy gives us an understanding of our family history, and that can be useful. It isn't important compared to the decisions we make. When we, as people, fail to do research and just follow along in some other idiots footsteps, when we think we have enough knowledge to oppress the knowledge and understanding of others we make the greatest mistakes human kind can make.

This happens a lot all over the world. I used to work with an atheist computer geek who thought he was better than he was. It was ridiculous, almost embarrassing, listening to him reason. In some ways he reminded me of when I was young, except, he couldn't actually learn or take the time to understand anything he didn't agree with. One of the other engineers and I were/are Linux geeks and he couldn't understand the attraction of Linux. He insisted that Windows was the only thing people used so it was the only thing worth working on.

I hope he eventually changed his mind, but, my point is that many people have that kind of closed minded inability to understand anything outside of their little world.  They believe they think for themselves and they are just following others.

I look back at my genealogy and I see many successful people, many people who were not very successful. One of my direct ancestors and one of my ancestors by marriage were hanged for witchcraft. Is that successful?

George W. Bush is one of my very distant cousins. Was he successful? Propagandistic jerks trying to influence how people think gamed Google to relate GWB with failure. Did those propagandists succeed? The Catholic Church did stuff like that for a thousand years, was that successful or was it a failure?

People are always going to try and force others to think a specific way, Anonymous, the Church, politicians, terrorists. Martin Luther King Jr. did it a little differently. MLK did not try to force anyone to do anything, he just protested the things he believed were wrong. MLK didn't ask his people to vandalize, deface and destroy the work others had done. MLK protested until the objections withered away.

Some of my ancestors were “Foresters”, which is kind of like being a “Sheriff”, as in the “Sheriff of Nottingham”. I loved Robin Hood, imagine what I felt like when I realized that my family had oppressed others.

My grandfather was a scab worker. He crossed picket lines and ended up as the General Manager of Marketing for Chrysler. He also received his commission as a lieutenant from Dwight D. Eisenhower.

There are a lot of kewl things we can learn from history, genealogy, the key is learning. The key is always learning.