My Ancestry.com Phase

Why I Can't Unsubscribe (Messed-Up But Managing #16)

I’m going to get vulnerable for a minute, real vulnerable. Ready? Here goes: not so long ago, I was in a dark place. That’s right, there was a dark period in my life, my personal Dark Ages, a time when I fell into the black hole known as… Ancestry.com. It all started with a free trial. Seven days. Seven. Little. Days. That was all they needed to hook me for 30. And let me tell you, they got me good, just like the salt-n-vinegar wings and butter mochi at Times Supermarket.

I told myself it would be casual. Just a peek. You know, just a little Where-did-I-come-from? exploration one night before bed. Next thing you know, it’s three in the morning, I’m five Coca Cola refills deep, and I’m arguing with myself about whether my great-great-great-grandfather was born in 1812 or 1813. The difference really really mattered. I have no idea why, but it did. I had to know. And after all that, now I’ve forgotten. But I’m assuming, for some reason, that it still matters.

Anyway, when the 7-day trial ended and I paid for a month, once that was done, I thought I would be free. But no. Not a chance. Ancestry.com has emailed me every single week since 2018. I have heard from them more than I have heard from some of my actual relatives. Can anyone out there relate? Come on, I can’t be the only guy who doesn’t unsubscribe from companies so I don’t feel lonely! Right? At this point, Ancestry.com might as well start signing the emails “Love, Your Cousins at Ancestry.”

I mean unsubscribing would just feel wrong now. Like, they know me. They know more about me than my kids probably do. They might know more about me than I do. So, unsubscribing would feel like cutting off a family member. A very needy, slightly manipulative family member who just wants me to see one more record about my fourth cousin twice removed, for a short fee, of course. Isn’t it bizarre how they even know I have a desire for such a thing? How is that?!

Again, I don’t think I am alone in this. Every family has that one person who takes it too far. The one who shows up at get-togethers with a family tree printed on a scroll and they want to show everyone; they act like they’re Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with sacred information. I kinda became that person. I’d ask my wife, “Did you know my ancestors survived a shipwreck? We are practically royalty!” No one cared. But I did. I guess I cared enough for everyone.

And what I found, oh man!, it was a wild ride. I found out one branch of my family lost a baby to sickness while crossing the ocean. It broke my heart. To read the ship manifest into Ellis Island with that info was tough. Then I discovered that another side of my family was part of the Huguenots who fled religious persecution. I was proud of that until I tried to register my daughter for a Huguenots Scholarship and the society overseeing it was pretty suspicious and very uncooperative. Then I thought, “Hmm, if that’s how they’ve always acted, no wonder they were persecuted!” (I kid!)

Then I found out they married into a Native American tribe and, wait for it…major plot twist…Pocahontas is my 13th great grand-aunt. That’s 100% true. How cool is that?! So yes, please take note Dear Reader, you are now drinking deeply from the words of a man related to Disney royalty. And I’d be most honored if, henceforth, you’d address me as Chief Can’t-Unsubscribe-From-Ancestry. Perhaps I’m related to Elsa and Anna, too. I suppose we’ll never know…unless, of course, I re-up my subscription to Ancestry.com.

But to be frank, it wasn’t all Disney movies and pride. It never is. Unfortunately, I also found out that some of my ancestors owned slaves and left those slaves to family members in their wills. As the father of adopted black children, that one punched me in the gut. It is one thing to read about history. It is another to realize your family was part of its worst chapters. One can only hope that whatever the situation was, the motivation wasn’t slavery but, as in the case of my wife and I, a desire to help others. I’m not sure I’ll ever know this side of time though, and I don’t want to attempt to sanitize history. So, I just have to leave it at that.

There was a grandpa who flew to Honolulu right after Pearl Harbor. I even saw his plane ticket. That was cool. And, of course, there were old newspaper clippings where my relatives looked like they were auditioning for the world’s saddest version of Peaky Blinders. There were faded photos of people holding bowling balls who somehow looked both twenty-five and eighty-five at the same time. Weird! Interestingly, I found out that many of my ancestors came over as strict Calvinists. But within a generation or two, they swung Arminian. I guess it wasn’t predestined after all. Lol! Eat your heart out, Calvin! Turns out, even five-point Calvinists could change their minds once they got a taste of the New World...and maybe apple pie. Somewhere in there, there was even an old preacher. Of course, there were a whole lot more non-religious relatives, too.

But the longer I stayed in the rabbit hole, the more I realized something: these were not just names on a chart. They were people. Real, messy, complicated people, which is totally fitting for my genealogy, who lived and fought and loved and cried and failed and tried again. Some of them sailed across oceans. Some of them stayed in one town their whole lives. Some of them made brave choices. Some of them made terrible ones. But somehow, all of them…led to me.

It is mind-blowing and humbling to realize you are the product of a thousand decisions you had no say in.

(I’m leaving the one sentence above to stand on its own because, well, when I wrote it, it hit me like an existential and metaphysical ton of bricks.)

That survival and sacrifice and hope and heartbreak all stitched together this weird, wonderful quilt that I call my life. Thinking about this made me tear up, grieve, and sit in awe all at the same time. I mean, think about it: if one Huguenot had doubted God’s hand in things at the wrong moment or one random cousin had said no to a ceremony at a tribal fire or a dance at a barn raising, I might not even exist. I really do, in some sense, owe my life to a series of awkward moments, bad decisions, and others’ choices. And so do you!

So yeah, I got sucked into a genealogy phase. And yeah, I spent way too many nights researching people who died 300 years ago and beyond. And yes, I am still getting emails from Ancestry like an ex who just wants to check in, for a short fee, of course. But I would not change it. Because somehow, digging into the past made me appreciate the present a little more and realize I am just one weird relative away from being the embarrassingly hilarious story future generations tell at Thanksgiving. And as a comedian, well, I would absolutely love that.