A Footnote in Someone Else's Family Tree

I've been continuing to play with ancestry.com--in one or two branches I've (in theory) reached the 900s in France and England. Some of the stories that are coming clear ring true--chap marries youngish in France, has some kids, leaves the wife in charge in Bretagne and goes over with William the Bastard, set s up housekeeping in England, wife clearly comes goes back and forth (as suggested by the birth of one son on the Isle of Jersey), she eventually returns to France and dies there, with some of their kids remaining in France to hold on to things there, but Dad and some of his sons stay in England and die there. Makes sense to me. What makes less sense is that every frickin' generation there's at least one genealogy that insists they're all Sirs and Lords and Sires and so forth. At one point someone insisted that my great-great-whatever was the second duke of Devonshire--which would be lovely, but the gent in question was born in the 1100s, and the dukedom of Devonshire wasn't created until...the 1600s, I think? Or maybe later? So yes: there's a little bootless aggrandizement going on.

But the thing that struck me today, as I was going through and tracking down hints, is that most of us are really only interested in the issue that produced our immediate ancestor. Which is to say, if Daisy-Marie Duquesne and Bruce Walpurgis have eleven children, one of whom was Wilmer Walpurgis, my great3 grandfather, I'm going to care more about Wilmer than the other ten kids, where most (not all but most) of the genealogies will mention the kid they're descended from. I've been taking as much care as possible to make sense of all the various children of each person I link to the tree (and sometimes it's just tragic: three daughters all named Sarah, each of whom died before they were three--you'd think they'd have decided to try a new name?) but it's also clear that the overwhelming importance of Wilmer will not be clear to someone who is descended from Wilmer's sister Berthilde.

It's just kind of interesting.