Last week, Ancestry.com absolutely, totally, and utterly consumed my attention. I was late for Zoom meetings, missed both lunch and dinner one day, and gave myself a stitch having to run (OK, walk-run) to a hair appointment because I just had to do one more search before I left the house.

I've always enjoyed hearing friends' (and friends' mother's) stories about their adventures in genealogy, but since I'm shockingly incurious about my own family tree, I had never dabbled.

I love biographies, but I must admit that I tend to zone out in those early chapters about the subject's forebears--I have a hard time keeping the generations straight and always get a bit lost in the branches. With a different subject, I might have skimped on the family history, but since Rita Mae's origin story is such a big part of her mythos--and of her early work--that wasn't an option. It's also a complicated story. As Rita Mae put it in her memoir, Rita Will, "we're all mixed up worse than a dog's breakfast."

Figuring things out so that I can explain them elegantly was quite the task, but oh what fun. I now understand why people become obsessed. It's a(n often frustrating) puzzle, a research challenge, and a fascinating slice of history. Still, I'm now comfortable negotiating Census records, city directories, and records of births, marriages, and deaths.

My favorite part, though, was searching through local newspapers. Ancestry.com has a relationship with Newspapers.com, a database that I'd used before, though not for genealogical purposes. OMG! My love for feminist and gay publications will never fade, but it turns out that all old papers are full of fascinations!

It has become commonplace to fret about how biographers of the future will cope in the post-letter-writing era, but I am much more concerned about the disappearance, or at least the severe diminishment, of the local press. As someone who grew up in a small village where women of my mother's generation and older would study the local paper like a holy text, I used to be irritated by all that trivia. Call me a convert. The joy of finding a mention of familiar names in the listings of visitors and birthday parties and even the casts of school plays!

One of the casualties of the Internet age is reading the newspaper the way the editors intended--that is, what page a story runs on, and where on that page it appears; what size the headlines are and what else is in that section. (Side note: Edinburgh Libraries provides free access to PressReader, a service that makes it possible to read thousands of newspapers and magazines in their original formats. It's amazing--I now begin my day with the morning paper, like it was the 1950s or something!)

Looking at newspapers from the late 1930s and early '40s was particularly jarring. A report of an out-of-town visitor appeared alongside the text of a message Hitler sent to Roosevelt, and chillingly, another useful but trivial factoid ran next to a story headlined, "Speedy Action Is Sought by Jews."

It's hard to imagine that the local papers that survive today--most hollowed-out by conglomerates and private equity firms, and where AI is "supplementing" the ever shrinking roster of journalists--will be a fraction as useful to researchers of the future.

LISTEN TO ME: A couple of weeks ago I joined Julia Turner and Stephen Metcalf on the Slate Culture Gabfest for a fun discussion of the Netflix movie Jay Kelly, the film version of the Broadway Merrily We Roll Along, and billionaires fighting over Warner Bros.

RECOMMENDATIONS: I've been reading a lot of biographies and books about biography, which has left me a bit fiction-deficient this year. So when I learned that there is a Barbara Vine book about a biographer, I had to read it. The Blood Doctor was my first Barbara Vine in a very long time, and I had forgotten just how great a writer Ruth Rendell was. The characterization and the voice is so assured, and while the plot was a bit meh--if plot's your thing, stick to the Inspector Wexford books--the added thematic elements of family history, the expulsion of the hereditaries from the House of Lords, and the creation of new generations were fabulous.