I follow CeCe Moore’s blog posts on scientific genealogy pretty closely. But it’s more because of my interest in personal genomics broadly, rather than scientific genealogy as such. My own knowledge of my family’s past beyond the level of grandparents is very sketchy. This despite the fact that I know I have two very well documented lines of ancestry which I could follow up on, my paternal lineage, and the paternal lineage of my mother’s maternal grandfather. I don’t have a great interest in this beyond the barest generalities, and my parents tend to have a rather disinterested stance as well. Why? I can’t help but wonder if part of the issue is that unlike many South Asians my family has a relatively diverse background, so it isn’t as if we are sustained by a coherent self-identity as members of a sub-ethnicity (Bengalis are not tribal, so lineage groups are more ad hoc and informal). Additionally, there is probably some self-selection in the type of personalities who would transplant themselves across continents and are willing to spend the majority of their lives in a nation not of their birth.
But CeCe’s post did get me to reflect on an …