Recently I received a notification from Ancestry.com offering me the opportunity to opt out of Mother's Day and/or Father's Day e-mails, in case they might cause me pain.
Dear Ancestry.com,
I appreciate the good intentions behind your desire not to add to any pain I might be feeling about those days into which our culture has chosen to distill the Fifth Commandment to a particular moment in time. I also understand that in so doing you are just following the crowd of companies that have decided it might be good business to show a little apparent sensitivity, as I wrote about last year in the case of Shutterfly.com.
But Ancestry, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? Honoring our mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, is the whole reason for your existence.
The study of genealogy is "Honor thy father and thy mother" writ large. And Mother's Day and Father's Day are two of the most inclusive holidays possible. Everyone has a mother, and everyone has a father. That's basic biology, the facts of life. It doesn't say anything about how good a particular father or mother might have been, and neither, for that mother, does the Fifth Commandment.
A company whose core purpose is to connect people with their ancestors should know better than anyone that we research, discover, and honor our forebears not because they were particularly good, or bad—and everyone has plenty of both in his family tree—but because they are ours, and without them we would have no existence at all.
I think that's worth celebrating. If you don't, that's none of my business. But Ancestry.com certainly gets plenty of my business, because of its core purpose and resources—so I find its jumping on the current bandwagon of corporate conscience amusingly ironic.
