There are people who think genealogy is a precise, well-ordered science. These people are wrong. Genealogy is chaos. It is a mess of contradicting records, illegible handwriting, and bureaucratic black holes designed specifically to make you question your own existence.
I learned this the hard way last night, sitting at my desk at 2 AM, squinting at an 18th-century Spanish birth record that may or may not contain the name I was looking for. It was like staring into the void. Every letter blurred together into an ink-stained hallucination. My glasses sat uselessly beside me. My knees ached. My back ached. My very soul ached.
And then, just when I was about to give up—there it was. A name. A name I recognized.
Or so I thought.
A rush of triumph hit, the kind that only a genealogist understands—that brief, euphoric moment when you think you’ve cracked the code. But before I could celebrate properly, I noticed something off. The dates. The dates did not match. In fact, they were off by forty years.
Forty years. Which meant either:
- My ancestor was a medical marvel who had children well into his nineties.
- I had spent four hours staring at the wrong person’s name like an absolute idiot.
The second option was the correct one.
I sat back in my chair, stared at the ceiling, and briefly reconsidered every decision that had led me to this point. This was not the first time I had spent an entire evening tracing the wrong branch of the family tree, and it would not be the last. I rubbed my temples, groaned, and did the only logical thing a man can do in this situation: I poured a glass of whiskey and accepted my fate.
People think genealogy is about uncovering family stories. It isn’t. It’s about failure. It’s about tenacity. It’s about sitting in a chair for so long that your spine starts resembling the scrolls you’re trying to read. It’s about realizing that half of historical record-keeping was done by people who did not care about your future struggles.
Take 18th-century priests, for example. Did they understand that their sloppy handwriting would one day send a grumpy old American man into an existential spiral? No. No, they did not. They wrote names with the reckless abandon of men who assumed nobody would ever need to read their work again. And here I am, centuries later, attempting to decipher whether someone wrote “Juan” or “José” with ink that has spent 200 years fading out of pure spite.
This is genealogy. It is not a science. It is an endurance test. A psychological experiment designed to see how much nonsense a person can take before losing their mind entirely.
But I’ll be back at it tomorrow. Because somewhere, hidden in these records, is the truth. And I am just stubborn enough to find it.