re: Do you care about your ancestors or your descendants?

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Interesting question on a board that seems obsessed with lionizing and constantly memorializing their poor Rebel brethren.

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Feel free to link me having ever done that. In fact, it's mostly why I generally make the point that I have almost nothing in common with someone who happened to reside in the same geographical location that I currently do 150 years apart. This is what happens when people refuse to treat people as individuals...

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On the surface, this makes sense, but I think you are in fact being too facile. If memory serves, you are a medical professional?

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I do advertising/graphic design work, so no.

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Ditto some black people. If you had lived through the brutal early-mid-century Jim Crow era in, say, Mississippi, are you honestly positing that inherited trauma wouldn't be possible?

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I'm saying that, for me at least, without a direct personal link to a person either in the past or future, I'd find it nearly impossible for me to empathize with their plight in any real, meaningful way other than in a general sense. It certainly would not be enough to animate me, and it would clearly not force me to hold others who, like me, were not alive then and had no part in any of it accountable for the crimes of others.

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Feel free to link me having ever done that.

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Yeah, I wasn't saying you, I was saying the zeitgeist of the board.

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In fact, it's mostly why I generally make the point that I have almost nothing in common with someone who happened to reside in the same geographical location that I currently do 150 years apart

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I have argued this for years, so I agree with you.

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I'm saying that, for me at least, without a direct personal link to a person either in the past or future, I'd find it nearly impossible for me to empathize with their plight in any real, meaningful way other than in a general sense. It certainly would not be enough to animate me, and it would clearly not force me to hold others who, like me, were not alive then and had no part in any of it accountable for the crimes of others.

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That's fair, but I think it's avoiding the real question. But in any event, you might have some connection to the long dead via inherited family story/trauma/whatever.

But overall, what you are saying almost has to be true. Seems related to how we respond way more viscerally to one person's suffering in our immediate circle than to millions of people suffering worse in some remote land. The human brain is not evolved to think globally - we are tribal animals.

I try do to right by my ancestors.

I constantly let my boys know about their gr gr grandad who fought for the confederacy for four straight years. He then had to walk home from North Carolina back to Mississippi after the surrender. I repeat this to them every time they get down or when they think life is tough.

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care a bunch

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Being interested or even fascinated in their story and the history of your family geneology is not the same as “caring” to the extent OP was referring to.

I can study and be interested in my ancestors without needing to be comforted because some of them were mistreated at some point.

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inherited trauma wouldn't be possible?

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Doesn't sound "inherited", rather, taught.

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my descendants were probably poor idiots

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That’s an awful way to speak of your progeny

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because some of them were mistreated at some point.

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On my mother's side, the ancestors left Germany, the Rhineland, for religious persecution reasons during the 18th Century. A ship took them to England and from there were to head to Nova Scotia. The ship captain abandoned all on board, some five hundred or more in England. Took their funds and left them with nothing. Half the people either starved or got diseased.

My ancestors found help, as well as others, while in England and eventually found passage. They did have a new course and ended up in South Carolina. True story.

They paid the price for my being born in America. It is not tribalism but rather gratitude I have for them.

And think about this:

If you are from European decent, your ancestors are the bad asses that survived the Black Death!

I'm in about where the OP is, but I do think it's interesting to see how far it goes back, mostly here in the Americas. I won't do tests or anything but think I need to have more convos with older member's sooner than later.

From what I currently can tell I'm thinking mid-late 1700s is the start, but wouldn't be surprised if it goes into the 1600s. Latest being late 1800s, so no one in my lineage was born in Europe from 1900s on. I say Europe as that's where all my lineage comes from, other than probably native mixed in there here and there...but that's the hardest to determine, but hard to dismiss at this time.