who is in her 70s, it is dogs. She has three dogs, all of whom keep her from going anywhere though she can well afford to travel. Let me just say that I have a dog, whom I love, but my life comes first. With my aunt it is dog books, dog shows, those books and calendars with the dogs dressed like people, movie stars who dress their dogs ("Isn't that neat?") and almost everything else in the world is not worth discussing. I think it's an aversion to intimacy or closeness. My mother is enthusiastic about nothing but true murder books. My point is that it is not necessarily the obsession, but what the obsession precludes. If you can't have a conversation about anything but genealogy, dogs or murder, that leaves out a whole bunch of stuff related to the human condition. It's pretty sad. I love Everclear, but not to the exclusion of all else, and there's really no point in discussing Everclear, or becoming overly enthusiastic about them, but I will watch it.

This topic caught my attention because I was raised in a religion absolutely obsessed with genealogy - Mormonism. My mother has spent countless hours of her life poring over microfiche and making rubbings of gravestones and writing letters to little old ladies in charge of small-town historical societies. Her masterpiece is a bedsheet with a flowchart of family history written in black Sharpie with a ruler to keep the lines straight. For her, it is a religious imperative with implications for her ancestors in the afterlife. But it is also a window into other, completed lives that led into her own - she has pored over the traces of their lives the way I pore over novels. She has probably gleaned just as much useful information about the human condition from them.

Yes, my mom can talk about our family genealogy for hours and yes, she does tend to dwell on the far distant, minor royalty. But she is no less absorbed in the hardships of her nameless pioneer ancestors - the struggling farmers, the faceless housewives. When I was younger I thought it was boring as hell. Now that I'm in my early 30s, I find it less so. I have a more immediate sense of my own mortality, my own relative mediocrity and the importance of history. I watch Antiques Roadshow. I read markers at historical sites. I look at old photographs in antique stores and wonder, Who were these people?

I don't necessarily get a reaching for grandiosity or reflected glory from the LW's description of his/her parents' interest. As my parents get older, they get more voluble and aggressive about their enthusiasms, more calcified in their likes and dislikes. They want so much to connect, to break through to me and my siblings and our busy lives. They want to be heard. They want to be remembered. They know their time is shorter.

The LW just sounded ... bored, or taken aback, or like he/she couldn't get a word in edgewise. If the LW's primary concern is maintaining a thriving relationship with their parents I'd suggest just ... patiently listening, riding it out. That level of intensity won't last forever. Gently redirect them. Find ways through their stories about their ancestors into their own lives - what do they remember about long-lost relatives? What stories did they hear and how did they react? What parallels do they see in modern life? Express an interest in recording their memories. Treat them as if they were of historical interest. And make sure their records are well-kept - LW may find them more interesting someday!

I'm not yet 60, but I'm a genealogy hobbyist who has sometimes been pretty obsessive. I've been part of the USGenWeb Project since 1997, I maintain a couple of big family databases and do lookups for people searching for other people. I've been interested in genealogy since I was a little girl looking through old albums at my grandma's house.

There's a genealogists' joke that men do genealogy to see how they're related to famous people and women do genealogy to see how they're related to their husbands. So far, I've identified seven sets of common ancestors with my husband among New England colonists, with the closest relationship being eighth cousins.

Our numerous common descents are not remarkable. About 40% of Americans are related to each other within the ninth degree. If you have any colonial ancestors, you're probably related to someone famous -- Cole Porter was my fifth cousin four times removed!!! Being related to famous Americans is just about random, so feeling superior or inferior on account of this is not logical.

My interest is fundamentally in how America works, how things got the way they are, stuff that I wasn't taught in school. I'm a native westerner, and I never had reason to think about Connecticut, but some days it seems like everybody came from Connecticut. The real lightbulb day for me was when I realized that Thurston Howell had two ancient Long Island names, yet, for all the history I'd taken in college, I hadn't ever learned this kind of social information, and now I needed to rethink "Gilligan's Island" and just about all of American literature.

I'm interested in how Americans got to the Pacific coast. From novels, movies, and TV we get the picture of the lone and isolated pioneers. But this isn't the way they did it -- they moved in big family groups, sometimes whole neighborhoods, sometimes church congregations. At other times I think it's pretty funny that my paternal ancestors and my husband's paternal ancestors, unknown to each other, left Massachusetts in the 1780's and made the Northern Tier migration over the next 150 years, with the result that, eventually, my darling and I could be high-school sweethearts in an isolated town in North Central Washington.

From another direction, as we get closer to the old-timers, they get more interesting. Their troubles and their achievements move us more deeply.

And, ever and always, dead relatives are a lot less trouble than live ones.