The following was produced by Bing Chat, including the hyperlinks to sources. Did it miss anything important?
There are many exciting benefits of researching your family history. Some of them are:
- It can give you a sense of purpose and a deeper personal identity by connecting you to your ancestors and their stories.
- It can provide mental stimulation and cognitive benefits by challenging you to learn new skills and discover new information.
- It can strengthen your family connections by inspiring you to share your findings with your relatives and listen to their stories.
- It can improve your medical knowledge by revealing potential risk factors or inherited conditions that may affect your health or your family’s health.
- It can expand your social network by helping you meet other people who are interested in genealogy and who may share some of your ancestry.
Researching family history can also have some downsides. Some of them are:
- It can reveal uncomfortable family secrets or conflicts that may affect your relationships with your living relatives or your sense of identity.
- It can be time-consuming, expensive, or frustrating if you encounter difficulties in finding or accessing records, or if you encounter dead ends or conflicting information.
- It can raise some privacy concerns if you use DNA testing or online databases that may share your personal information with third parties or expose you to unwanted contact from distant relatives .
- It can be incomplete or inaccurate if you rely solely on DNA testing or online sources that may not contain all the information about your ancestors or may contain errors or gaps.
I can also become addictive. I certainly am. Cheers, BT
I think the frustrations factor is my least favourite outcome. Why no marriage record? Why no passengers list? Why aren’t the people from my tree who pioneered in Algoma, buried with cemetery records there? Who is Doris and why does she copy trees into s 200,000 people tree called Synchronizer?
And my biggest frustration: the person who put some of my people and many others in a fictional tree.
But then, someone shares a photo or a story, and I feel rejuvenated.