Metal Detector

just to put it out there, tracing your family history on an ancestry website is, more often than not, a confused ego project. we are all related, literally. the distinctions between so-called families are arbitrary categorisations made for political, social and patriarchal reasons, perpetuated by habit and tradition. in fact, you are, in the most literal sense, related to every living thing on earth: apes, fish, insects, bananas, trees, mushrooms, bacteria etc. your great great great x 10⁵ grandmother/father, a direct line of parentage, was an ape at a time when humans didn't exist. if you went back far enough your mom's mom's mom's (etc) would be some form of worm. this is not hyperbole.

the confusion of these website is in artificially selecting one lineage out of many and elevating it to "your" ancestry, when actually it is everyone's ancestry. by the time you're going back 20 generations, you have roughly 2,000,000 direct parental relatives, so that's not including uncles, cousins etc (its actually much lower due to varying degrees of inbreeding, but that's a whole other story. as an illustration the figure of 2 million will do). that's only tracing back roughly 500 years to the Tudors. and from those millions of direct relatives, the ancestry website picks up on a few of them for whom there exists a record, and makes you feel like you're related to royalty or some person of note, which, as pointed out, we inevitably all are. of course the history of the countless poor and faceless peoples you are related to 20 generations back is unrecorded and "blind" to ones view. in any case, what is left to us (in fragments, fossils and public record) is a strange and corrupted lens.

then there's also the issue of these companies storing your genetic soul and selling it on to third parties so that in years to come you can't get life or medical insurance when the NHS has been fully privatised and god knows what else. mostly it's about building up huge databases of information whose value they know has not yet come to fruition, probably by many orders of magnitude. 

Glide over the superficial
And the apparatus might squeal with delight

You never know

Might find more than you bargained for
Skeletons and keys

Might

Open a truth

Might

Make a rich story out of scraps

Looking for booty
Or a filthy crest
On all fours
I see a man
Tugging at roots

At the helical dendrites of subterranean heritage

And hoping for rushing gold

To understand, you must kneel
Before the gods of clay
What do they say?

Mostly mud
In the vein of ore
By the line of blood
Mine, dirty

So mind your step

As skulls are mined

Exploding fragments of history 

Into a colourful tapestry

So proceed with caution and

Think of the children!
The questions, hard
Stone, even
Petrified by the thought
Of facing family's history

Sift through the dirt