Personal Note 📝 (Dani)

Let me preface this by saying I always thought family trees were dumb

I never felt compelled to create one. It’s something I always thought was cringy.

But thanks to modern technology (ditigization and AI), tracing one’s lineage has arguably never been easier; often requiring nothing more than a simple search of the last name in the correct database 🕵🏻‍♂️ For all of my cynicism, I now have to admit that having a geneaology tree made is quite fascinating - especially because what I found is not what I expected.

Part of the reason I had no interest in geneaology is because I believed (and still do) that it has no practical effect on the present. Life does not change simply because you found out what year your ancestor entered through Ellis Island. Nonetheless, researching ancestry does give a deeper understanding of how societies lived before us.

In many ways, you will find that it was quite different to now… in other ways surprisingly not. This gives a more personal, human-scale perspective on the past that is entirely different to learning about it in a dark classroom conveniently scheduled right after lunchtime 😴 seriously, whose idea was that? How are we not expected to fall asleep. Do you know how boring Colonial American history is?

But the dynamics of history change a little bit when you realize you are the direct descendent of people whose lives were shaped by such events. Idk, ya’ll might not find all of this as interesting as I did. But it’s still funny to be able to say that we still have a lineage in the United States that spans back MUCH FARTHER than the nativist, immigrant-hating racist we currently have as president.

However, after this thorough ancestral review that has required a deep look a American history, I can also say it’s easy to spot how the past has shaped our present.

Easy research quickly yielded an unmanageable volume of data. Since existing genealogy-tracking websites couldn’t fully integrate all the information I was gathering from multiple sources, I decided to get creative and just build my own repository for this information 🗃️ Mainly, this website serves as an enormous personal project to learn the HTML coding basics behind creating a website (which i think went well!🤞🏼) - and to give my Dad and siblings this repository of information I believe they should also have access to. My lineage is also their lineage after all.