At a time when history has never been so widely and blissfully ignored, and not just by our president, millions of Americans are busy spitting into DNA-collection tubes, scrutinizing old newspapers and tracing their family history back as far as they can via the website Ancestry and other services. Historians like me tend to scoff at these attempts. Who cares if you’ve just found out you’re related to George Washington’s aunt? So what?

But that was before I learned of a relation of my own, a Connecticut woman from the early 19th century named Harriet Gold, and I’ve gotten fairly obsessed with her.

In my defense, she is a figure of genuine historical interest. I included her in a book of history I was writing without even realizing she was, as the genealogists say, “one of ours.” She turns out to be the grandniece of the man who lies under an obelisk at the center of my family graveyard — the “founder” of our clan.

Now you’re the one going — so? Here’s the thing: Suddenly that book was no longer just by me. It was also about me. Two different books. History and genealogy, after all, are two radically divergent takes on the past. The first says, “This matters.” The second says, “This matters to me.”