My mother was a young child when her father introduced her mother to domestic violence - Gran divorced him. I didn't want to follow his family - I'd never met any of them.
My father's father had changed his name in 1949 when Dad was 19 years old, and I could trace his family back to his great-grandfather who went to New Zealand from Sydney in around 1842. I couldn't find any relations before that. His mother, my other Gran, came from a family which I could trace back at least to the 15th century. Those distant relatives would have been... well, not exactly poor, but would have worked for and rented their homes from the rich landowners. Some of this family moved to Australia, and others moved to New Zealand.
There were a couple of convicts I traced from England to Australia who weren't, then, our historical family. The first one would've been young (around 16, I think, when she was transported to Australia in 1790 and sent on to Norfolk Island and back to Sydney. One of her granddaughters moved to Tasmania and married another convict who'd earned the end of his 7-year sentence in 1825, and one of their granddaughters moved to New Zealand and met and married one of my great-uncles - one of Gran's brothers. So, now we had two convicts recorded in our family tree!
History can cause so many problems - like, do you remember all of your relatives? How many kids did your grandparents have? Did you ever visit them? I remember a lot of my father's mother's family - we visited their farms or their town homes, and most of them seemed to live in the Waikato area in New Zealand. A couple of others I remember lived in the South Island, so we didn't see them very often.
We had the first family reunion I remember - sometime in the 1960s, so many people from that family that I don't remember but I loved that reunion. We had a second one in the 1980s but those I do remember were the ones we'd visited before.
I kept thinking of family reunions and wondered who else does them? Wikipedia has info about them, and some, it seems, are held every year. The pic at the top of that Wiki page shows a Swedish family who are "people descending from a common ancestor born in 1776". The convict I wrote of first here was born in 1772 - there's a lot of our family and other families related to her over the past two and a half centuries: maybe so many people we never got to know.
We're towards the end of acknowledged Covid, but not every state is yet wanting to open this country from it. Maybe, if you're not working or isolated or in lockdown somewhere, then you could start your own family history. If you believe in your relatives, then do it! If you're not interested in it... well, never mind - just decide for yourselves whatever you will do for these last few months of Covid.
Perhaps that will be part of our 'history' too.
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