Per ardua ad alta

When you undertake family history, if you are doing more than putting down a name, date of birth and death in a box, there can be times when you become very emotionally attached to the people you are researching.
They become people again, rather than data, as you gradually come to know some of their life stories, and you get to remotely share their ups and downs, generations later.
When I come across an ancestor or distant relative who dies before childbearing age, I place a cross in the suffix box, to denote an end of that particular line. I actually find it upsetting, and say sorry to them as I do it. It can be worse when a young relative has had their life cut short when they have fallen in the theatre of war. I think of what might have been for them. If they were unmarried before they went off gladly to protect their country, and fell on a foreign field without family to give them comfort in their final moments. The waste of a life not filled to potential is so sad. There would have been children unborn, perhaps they could have gone on to benefit humanity in a huge way? Instead, there was an empty void in a mother or sweethearts arms.
There are families who strove to raise children, and instead 9 out of ten offspring died within a 5 year period of each other, maybe from epidemics, or through having no defence against common ailments due to lack of adequate nutrition or sanitation in the family home... and yet, against the odds, maybe one survived their childhood and went on to raise families of their own. You sometimes wonder how they had the strength to go on - and sometimes triumph, in the face of adversity.
I've seen it written in the arena of social media, that if you are going to get upset about what you may find out in your family tree, then don't do it. I would disagree. I'd rather have empathy and be close to my ancestors - whatever their story, than be cold and clinical and use genealogy as a data collecting exercise.
Yes, there are times when I have to switch to researching another branch of my family tree for a few days because I've become too upset about the tragedies that have blighted the people I'm researching. But I go back and visit them after stepping away for that short while. Finding newspaper articles and searching the local and national timeline during their lives, is like popping in for a cup of tea and gossip, as you get a sense of what they would have talked about, what would have directly affected them as well. Also, sometimes if you are lucky, a newspaper article (or several) may contain some news about your relative (even if it is about them coming third in the local show for growing the best potatoes).