Every few years I get a wild hair up my ass to do some genealogy research. Found out that a great uncle was a police chief locally. Was shot and killed by a crazy person with paranoid delusions.
Every few years I get a wild hair up my ass to do some genealogy research. Found out that a great uncle was a police chief locally. Was shot and killed by a crazy person with paranoid delusions.
I've been doing it off and on since '14. It's definitely been interesting.Originally Posted by dodint
Thanks, bruv. Pretty sure there's some weirder and darker parts to it, but I'm not too interested in going down those roads.
Last edited by speedpimp; June 13th, 2022 at 02:39 PM.
My sister is quite into genealogy, spends a few hours each week researching. So we have a pretty extended family tree with good amount of detail on most of the people. Had the typical trouble of some non-Anglo ancestors who changed their name and had multiple spelling.
Also got some weird stuff (or maybe not so weird back then) - husband dies and brother marries widow so kids are technically cousins and half siblings, uncle and niece having kids and some other crazy loops that make the family tree more of a knot.
So far no great surprises from DNA. Some n-th cousins who are semi-famous, but no close relatives that we didn't know about.
The biggest scandals in our grandparents are having kids while unmarried and ditching a fiancé. About a 1 on the scandal meter. With parents gone and grandparents long gone there is no issues with these scandals.
Hope there is not too much fallout from your situation.
We had someone contact us after she'd been doing genealogy research, turns out my wife and her were distant cousins. Their last names were similar, though apparently on her side of the family at some point the name got tweaked a bit to appear to be "less Italian" when emigrating.
What was could about that was that she'd learned Italian to help her in her research and knew where the family was from - a little town up in the foothills of the Alps above Trento, and we got to go to the town and visit some distance relatives who still lived in the town. Was pretty neat seeing the cemetery in town, where almost all of the gravestones had either my wife's maiden name or the name of the other major family from the town. Also saw the church that had been there since the 1300s, and the other church under that one that dated back to at least the 900s.
The downside? We found out that there's a good chance Michele is distantly related to Rick Santorum, as that was the other name that was prevalent in the town.
Oh, no fear there, Rick was hatched.
First world problem #49,532:
Today a FedEx driver came to our office with an envelope requiring a signature. No problem. This has happened so often in my working life that I don't even remember it happening five minutes later.
Today, however, he asked to see my drivers license to prove I'm an adult. I'm probably old enough to be this guy's father, but okay. I pulled out my drivers license before thinking about it much and he reached to take it. I held it tight, starting to realize what he wanted to do. Then he aimed his hand-held device at it.
I pulled it away and asked if he was trying to take a picture of it.
"No, I just need to scan it."
Picture? Scan? What's the difference? The answer is no, either way. "I just work here" is what I told him, with a smile. I was not mean to the guy. If anything, I was nicer that usual. He's just doing his job and I'll probably see him again soon.
So then he asked for my exact date of birth and my name. Now, I've been signing my real name for deliveries at work since the 1980s, but I lied this time and gave him a something close to my last name and a fake birthdate. I never gave it much thought before, but it's none of their damn business what my full name is, when I was born, or where I live.
I'm just one of the drones in Sector 7-G who happened to answer the doorbell. The envelope is not addressed to me, and, even if it was, FedEx is not getting a copy of my drivers license to store in their database.
Who the %&*# do they think they are?
Here's there page on it, it's a new thing they started on 6/28: https://www.fedex.com/en-us/delivery...-services.html
Assuming they're being truthful (and they're a big enough company that I think they are, I've worked on similar PII-related things and you're usually pretty careful as SOCS compliance can bite you in the ass real seriously if you misrepresent things and an auditor finds it), they probably actually get less info by scanning than they do by looking at/taking a picture of your license.
Definitely get it though, and apparently they could use some work on teaching their delivery drivers about the change and how to explain it rather than relying on people finding a tucked away bit on their website.
Good luck to them with that.
They're a private business, not law enforcement.
Thanks for the link, though. It didn't occur to me to search for that, and I probably wouldn't have bothered if it had.
I've seen bars that scab a driver's license barcode to verify age as well. I don't actually know what that scan does, other than check the database and say "yep, adult". No idea what the retention is.
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