A fellow 50plus Senior News writer recently expounded on his lack of interest in the origins of his European ancestry.

He engagingly wrote, “None of my ancestors ever looked back with anything like nostalgia. As far as they were concerned, it was ‘good riddance’ to the Old Country and the quaint customs of impressment, bonded servitude, and nothing to eat.”

He wrote that “now, several generations removed from the terror of it, I still have no desire to seek my roots,” and he finds “secret satisfaction in being the descendant of refugees who were nobodies.”

I share some of those feelings, but I must address a widespread misconception that genealogy is of little use unless it results in the knowledge that one’s ancestors were rich, or noble, or famous, or all three. If finding famous ancestors is your sole reason for doing genealogical research, you are likely to be disappointed.

The great preponderance of souls who have inhabited this earth have been neither “members of the U.S. Senate, nor generals on horseback, nor millionaire entrepreneurs,” so don’t be surprised if you find none in your family tree.

Ancestral “celebrity searches” can have an undesired effect. As a novice researcher, you may go online and find family trees posted by others that purport not only to show your ancestors, but also that one or more of your ancestral lines descends from a prince, a famous author, or other luminary.

You must do your homework and corroborate each connection to the princely supposed ancestor by confirming the sources of the information. If you don’t, the presumed connection to glory is worthless.

I was the ninth and last child of Sicilian immigrants who came to America 100 years ago. My father was a laborer, my mother a housewife (what else would she be, with nine kids?).

I didn’t know it as a child, but my historical and genealogic studies have shown me that they lived in an impoverished land where the ruling classes excluded the common folk from education. To survive, they had to work at backbreaking labor in the fields or the sulfur mines. Their rights were virtually nonexistent.

Women married as young as 13, to bear children every two years until their mid-40s, or later. If a woman’s husband died young, she immediately had to remarry, to gain a father for her children; then she commenced having a child every other year with her second husband.

So, what had I to gain from researching the escapees from such a wretched life? I gained the knowledge that my ancestors, and my wife’s as well, trace back to mid-1700s Sicily. That my Coniglio ancestors back to my great-great-great-great-grandfather were born in tiny Serradifalco (The Mountain of the Hawk), dead center in the island of Sicily.

I found that Gaetano Coniglio was not only the name of my eldest brother, but also of four of my direct ancestors. I learned that my father had more than the one brother that I had known of, and that “Pa,” like I, was a seventh son.