They are questions as old as humankind: Where did I come from? How did I get here? What is my story?

They are important, defining questions. And answering them has become big business.

Once considered an activity of oldsters and amateur historians who disturbed dusty, forsaken library shelves in the pursuit of little scraps of analogue information, genealogical research has gone mainstream and digital. Personal ancestry has become the focus of massive digital databases, TV commercials, a growing segment of the tourism industry and actuarial science. It is no longer just the subject of personal curiosity and intimate conversations among family members of different generations.

Ancestry.com, the biggest for-profit genealogy company in the world, has sold more than 14 million DNA kits to date and has more than three million paying subscribers. All that activity has generated approximately 10 billion historical records. California-based 23andMe, which focuses more on genetic testing, owns the genetic data of more than five million people. The two companies are valued at $2.6 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively.

Those big questions — and many of the niggling little ones that naturally follow — will be among the topics discussed at the annual conference of the Ontario Genealogical Society at RBC Place London this weekend. (Yes, the sign over the canopy on York Street still says London Convention Centre, but that moniker is gradually being phased out.)

Megan Houston, executive director of Ontario Ancestors (since February, the new brand that geneological society has adopted), says it has seen a fairly dramatic upswing in interest in recent years. It connects with upward of 25,000 people a month, assisting them with searches, scholarship and education, in addition to its advocacy work.

Houston supports the use of multinational companies such as Ancestry in the search for personal genealogical information, provided the user is familiar with the terms and conditions attached to DNA tests and subscription agreements. But she says that type of testing, for many amateur sleuths and family history buffs, can offer only some starting points.

What people really want to know, what they want to explore, she says, is the lore that accompanied a family’s journey from, say, Ireland to Canada. They want to know that a mother had 12 children and that only six survived to adulthood — but they also want to know why.

“You spit into a tube, you sent it in, you get that one page (of information) from Ancestry. Now what?” she says, pointing out that most people then want to learn some of that hidden history — stories and explanations formerly secreted away, the hardships families endured, biological links to people who are famous and, increasingly, connections to Canada’s Indigenous Peoples.

The migration of genealogical activity and research to digital formats, Houston says, is in full swing. Family history buffs are increasingly using social media accounts, blogs, online family reunions and other digital platforms to convene people in order to share family lore, gather information and move past the DNA test.

The leading repositories of family information, however, continue to be local libraries.

“Libraries really are the lifeblood of a lot of our communities,” Houston says, adding that those institutions are essential to filling in the gaps in family histories through local periodicals or one-off amateur histories written by hobbyists or politicians. For that reason, the society is advocating against provincial cuts to libraries and inter-library loan programs.

“Without our local libraries, we would be lost. They really are the keepers of what it is that we do,” she says.

Critics of the digitization of personal and family information, of course, point to the big DNA companies as being the ultimate usurpers and destroyers of personal privacy.

We are, for the sake of curiosity and convenience, detractors claim, not only giving away our names, birth dates, phone numbers, unique identifiers, geo-locations and other data — we’re now even giving away the ultimate bits of data that make us who we are, our DNA.

Yet despite those risks, the surging interest in ancestry and genealogy is, among other things, an undeniable indicator of how elemental our knowledge of our past, our sense of belonging and our place in the world are to us as human beings.

In an age in which we’ve been digitized, anonymized and de-personalized to the extreme, we long — perhaps more urgently than ever before — to know what makes us uniquely us.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist. cornies@gmail.com