The Mystery of Carl Miller

Sarah Miller | Longreads | July 2016 | 10 minutes (2,438 words)
There’s an Ancestry.com ad in my Twitter feed: “What Does Your Last Name Say About You?” It follows me everywhere, as if it can sense my annoyance.
I find the current obsession with genealogy, specifically as practiced by Boomers and members of “The Greatest Generation,” to be extremely tiresome. If you’re a person who bought your house for 2.5 times your salary which then increased exponentially in value, what more about yourself could you possibly want to know? And that’s not even taking into account all the Americans who have had their last names thrust upon them, in many cases violently. The advertisement’s tone of innocent curiosity strikes me as embarrassingly naive.
I am sure there are defensible reasons for studying one’s genealogy, but I don’t want to think about them because my contempt is important to me, and personal, and possibly even genetic, because of all the people in the world who don’t care about genealogy, I’m pretty sure no one cares less than my father. Read more…
You must be logged in to post a comment.