God damn, ita !, thank you. I'd seen that ad and just thought it was cheesy and crass, but I totally missed just how seriously fucked-up it was. I feel like a totally privilege-blind dumbass now. But it's a good thing. I want all my blind spots kicked to pieces.

To be fair, the ad with the White woman is just as bad.

I only saw that because my fingers were too slow on the remote. What's the white chick's spiel?

I am not only certain to never use ancestry.com, but I'm going to work out where to write to complain about that. I think it's horrific, and I want to get that on their record.

Ooh, that ad is ridiculous.

I am very annoyed--I have two friends that we try to do dinner together around once a month. The one friend cancels ALL THE TIME, usually at the last minute--usually with a good excuse, but it's still really annoying, since we all have busy work schedules and it's hard enough to schedule in teh first place. We hadn't gotten together since November, and I emailed them and we scheduled for today. The other one is having mad drama at work, but we arranged to be eating at a restaurant next to her office building, and she figured she could at least come have a drink, if not stay for a whole dinner. ....and then half an hour ago, the cancelly one? Canceled. So now I don't get to see EITHER of them. GRRRRRRR.

I'm sorry for your loss, ita.

Tom, I'm sorry about your layoff. I hope you have enough time away from work to recover, and then get something much more satisfying than your last job.

ita,

okay, I exaggerated, but this is the one I am referring to:

[link]

woman: I found out my great great grandmother gave birth to 5 children and only one survived. I feel so lucky.

WTF? Lucky? No lady, that isn't the term I would use. That's how we all got here because some of our possible ancestors survived birth and many others did not. Oh well.

That's life!

Ok, I don't get angry at the ancestry.com ad, but I do find it amusing how they create narratives out of basic public records. With the [other] white woman one, I always think "I never met my so-and-so, but I looked on ancestry.com, and it turned out she had an address that was at least 1700 miles away, and I can no longer find because of subsequent renumbering of addresses in Boise. And that was worth knowing."

("I never knew my maternal grandfather but I'm glad to have spent the $$$ to find out he was disbarred in Iowa [true]. That was worth knowing.")

That's life!

Seriously. You're African American and you don't think you have ancestors that died free? How does that work, exactly? It's called history, and certain bits of it are pretty much inevitable.

Anyway, I found mediarelations@ancestry.com, and I sent off an angry email that could have been better constructed. Which brings my total of "Are you fucking with me?" emails to only three. Fox, about the Melrose Place gay kiss, DC about tarting up Starfire, and this. I spend so much time mad, and that's it? Huh.

I never knew my ancestor, but it turns out she was probably a prostitute and caused my other ancestor to be disowned from his samurai class family. But I'll never know for sure because the records were blown up in Hiroshima. And that was worth knowing.

My pirate ancestor sacked the Irish coastal town of Baltimore and hauled most of the populace off to the slave markets of Morocco. That's worth knowing.

Oh, and my Puritan governor ancestor tried to sell my Quaker ancestors into slavery in Barbados, but the ship captains wouldn't cooperate.

My great-great-something-grandfather was listed in census records as having the occupation "luftmensch." Roughly translated from the Yiddish, that means someone who doesn't seem to do any work at all, but somehow manages to survive anyway, so as far as anyone can tell, he's living on air. And that was worth knowing.