Comment by Simon_ORourke

I don’t think anyone is actually trying to connect with distant cousins for social interaction; rather the shared DNA segments provide hard evidence to confirm distant ancestors. I got into genealogy a couple years ago after thumbing through some old family documents and I’ve been able to confirm 6th cousins (traced via our shared ancestors) using 23andMe data.

Now there are probably some who think genealogy is a silly pastime and maybe it is, but researching my family history helps me feel grounded and more connected to humanity so I derive a lot of benefit from it.

It's not really the selling point. The selling point is the interest in the genealogy, and the "finding the long-lost second cousins" is a feature that helps you address the genealogy.

Concrete example: My grandmother was born in Brooklyn. As it turns out, her half-brother lived a few blocks away. At the time my grandmother was born, he was 9 and living with his grandparents despite the fact his father lived nearby.

I still don't know why, but when I found out he even existed - something I didn't know until long after my grandmother died -, I also soon found his daughter was alive and well in New Jersey, and was able to get in touch. I now have pictures, and stories to fill in not just his background, but thanks to that connection I now have pictures of the graves of my great-great-grandfather, and several of his children, and stories about my grandmothers uncles, and aunts she never mentioned while she was alive.

I also have pictures of my great-grandfather - my mums grandfather - that I hadn't seen before.

Of course, that is reasonably close, but sometimes those things end up passed down one side of a family, with no copies existing, and you can increasingly find relatives far away from you in the tree who has photos of shared ancestors, and that proportion will increase dramatically with each new generation.

So every time I find a match, however remote, with an active account, you better believe I'll message them. Not because I care that we're related, but because I care about whether or not they can fill in some bit or other in my ancestry. For me, anyway, it's a fun puzzle more than anything else, when you go beyond the immediate family.

Like why is that one ancestor showing up as a widow one moment, and someone with the same name as her husband showing up as married to her sister in the next census with an implausible country of origin? Can I find evidence to corroborate theories? Can I find that notorious "hat maker from Bremen" that almost certainly didn't exist but was cover for infidelity, or evidence that he didn't exist (I almost certainly can't) - it'd be funny, because an entire arm of the family took on the supposed, probably invented, last name of the hypothetical hat maker because an ancestor of theirs thought it sounded posh.

The "long-lost second cousins" are just bit players in that game.

A first cousin of mine found a (adult) daughter he didn’t know he had through it. They are in the process of building a relationship. It was a significant/important discovery for them even without having a prior relationship.

That’s a very glib HN take.

Interest in family trees predates Ancestry.com and will certainly outlast it. It’s not necessarily about contact. I’m not sure what’s controversial here.

If you are from the United States its interesting to trace back your ancestry and last name to a specific person/persons from another country.

There are tons of websites for different last names in the United States, showing history of the name. Many times the last name be traced back to a singular person, which I find especially cool since you have sprawling families all connected by one guy who made the journey over. Obviously last names like Smith won't be like this, but if you have a unique last name it can actually be quite common that one person coming to the new world connects you and everybody else in the Americas together. I find that super cool to think about and I am glad people are doing the effort to research and find this info out.

My mom (70year old boom) is obsessed with it.

I think she is unhappy that our family line will likely end with me. (only child, who is almost a 40 year old virgin)

If you don't get to see the future you want, consume your time with the past.

The family tree is a big deal for Mormons due to their religious beliefs. They can baptise their ancestors, providing lost souls with a chance to convert after death.

The rise of services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have actually allowed people to discover information about their parentage that they would otherwise not have had access to, basically they find out that one or both of their parents are not biologically related to them. Individual situations range from extramarital affairs, closed adoption, in-familiy adoption (teen gets pregnant, her parents raise the child as a sibling), and those who’s parents chose to conceive with donor gametes. In many of these cases where it is a surprise, the parents have either actively chosen to withhold the information or didn’t know.

In cases where the user is trying to find their parent, it’s statistically unlikely that their parent would have taken the test, but 2nd cousin matches are very common. These seem like a huge distance away, but you can work backwards and build a family tree up to their great grandparents and fan out from there.

I not only found a genetic disorder that my mother and I shared (Partial PNP Deficiency) but I also found an woman who was the illegitimate daughter of my Uncle (who had passed away) and she was fianlly able to see pictures of him and know more about him.

There is so much more power in 23andMe's Raw Data regarding health than people realize and I am capitalizing on it. (Less with the v5 chip but it is still really good,)

Finding drugs with 23andMe is a waste of time and is not wehre they should be focusing on making money. They should be focusing on personalized medicine.

Others have shared some more heartwarming tales of using these services but I saw a story that in Australia a project is helping the children of sex tourists to look up their fathers via these services to get child support payments:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/dna-helps-children...

One of my parents was adopted creating a much higher incentive and an increased likelihood of finding nearer relatives.

She would not pursue out of respect to her adopted mother. Outside of this I would be in the same boat as you.

Family is extremely important to most people

I got a photo of my great-great grandfather as a result of a DNA match as well as lots of other information about him - so I suppose it depends if that sort thing interests you or not.

I used ancestry.com to help locate a "long lost sibling" of my in laws. They were able to partly rekindle a relationship after decades apart.

Not everyone is interested in genealogy, that's up to them, but to those of us who are, finding an unknown nth cousin may be worth a lot to untangle the lives of our ancestors, write the stories of our families, and find out where we come from, in a far wider sense than merely the genetic one.

But Ancestry is a roach motel. Of all sites that sell user-contributed data back to their users, and they're all scummy, I don't know any which are more scummy than Ancestry and MyHeritage.

just because you are anti-social, doesn't mean the general public are

I've found it extremely interesting. It's brought me greater insight into my grandfather I knew nothing about, and even the (very few) family traditions/recipes that have come down to me. It's made the world feel smaller and more connected, seeing actual relatives in all of these far off places, in the kind of way I always HOPED the internet would bring interconnectedness.

I think it's inherently human to want to understand who we are and where come from. Especially for someone like me in the USA. How did my people end up here?

I think a more common use case might be finding siblings if your adopted, or trying to reengage with your roots if you were say a member of an indian tribe or native hawaiian.

I have a family member who is retired and has taken up geneology as a hobby, she has connected our family history really far back. Not my cup of tea personally but I can see the appeal, its like a treasure hunt. She has traveled to go to old libraries and dig up newspaper archives.

Americans treat their ancestry (specifically the nations they come from) almost like zodiac signs. This is meme material (e.g. Plastic Paddies, Plywood Poles etc.)

It’s also helping children figure out who their bio dad is since most aren’t involved in their kids lives these days.