I am beefing up my family tree and my wife's tree on Ancestry.com. Ancestry has oceans of data and records. People often have recency bias, like the times we are in are the worst ever.

Well, browse through death records of people dying of horrible diseases now almost entirely eliminated, parents losing young children at an alarming rate, and all that. My own grandmother died of pneumonia in her 30s, less six months after giving birth. Census records and obits often identify people's jobs, such as "Laborer" or my ancestor the "glass packer" in Pittsburgh. Many of these people had difficult lives.

Records of why specifically immigrants moved to America are rare. How wonderful it would be to go back in time and ask. Like for the Irish on my side and my wife's, who came during the potato famine or a moderate distance on either side. What was that like? What tipped you over the edge?

Finally, some people can end up with a LOT of descendants in a hurry. My immigrant great-great-grandparents from Germany had seven children, and many of those had large families. Boom, the tree grows quickly. Many of their living offspring appear as "DNA matches" on Ancestry.

I was also surprised at how many people had no children or no surviving children, leaving no living descendants. For example, my wife's grandmother was one of five. Our granddaughters appear to be the only (so far) members of the fourth subsequent generation of those five siblings.

With modern low fertility rates in much of the US and the world, a lot of trees will be pruned soon.