Comment by vidarh

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.