Are we descended from the apes, the wolves or from Adam and Eve? Genealogy will never answer this question. But isn't it very interesting to find out the way of life of our great-grandparents and maybe even of their great-grandparents? Did they struggle through as day laborers, did they risk their lifes in different wars? Or were they respected craftsmen, did they have honorary posts in the community and modest wealth?
Well, curiosity and interest in the past are the motives of most genealogists, I suppose. They ask about the way of life in the past, they view landscapes and villages, which have been a home for their ancestors. In doing so they learn to understand coherences, which are important for our present time and even for our future.
In the German Reich Genealogy got a stale smack, which affects the mentality to this hobby of many people till today. The Nazis demanded of all people to prove their Aryan descent. Everyone had to lay out an "Ahnenpass", a genealogical passport, and the Nazis tried to archive and to catalog family trees. The documents of that time are help and curse together for today's German Genealogists: help on looking for places and dates, curse because they remind us of a dark epoch with the abuse of dates, which are very personal and without any information about living descendants.
People - specially in Germany - discovering Genealogy as their hobby today can't ignore the problems. But they shouldn't neither frighten away: What time are the twelve years of the Nazi's "Millenium" in Genealogy, which apply to 400 years without problems? For the most of the German areas there are good sources - about "normal" people too - since about the year 1600, which are suitable to make a family tree grow.
Since 1874 the registry offices (Standesämter) have collected all dates of birth, marriage and death. Before the churches had to document all these events, and the pastors did their job as well as the government officials do today. These "base dates" of human life are completed by a lot of documents collected in archives all over the world: records of the army, the guilds and the courts, land registers and tax assessments. All these documents today tell us stories about the daily life of our ancestors - there is a lot of material to discover.
Those who have been infected once by the "virus" Genealogy, can't stop searching. Everything we find out in each new try is absolutely thrilling. The human being as a hunter and collector - there is no "modern" hobby satisfying those instincts better. Besides you can meet people with the same interest, you'll visit unknown landscapes on your journeys to your roots, you'll understand history written on the back of the poors and you will solve mysteries NOT having moved the world...
Good luck to everyone who is infected too!