For me specifically the motivation was that my mother, who is naturally very good with dates and birthdays, would keep telling me "It's your {uncle, grandma, co

For me specifically the motivation was that my mother, who is naturally very good with dates and birthdays, would keep telling me "It's your {uncle, grandma, cousin}'s birthday, don't forget!" and I would think to myself, "what kind of bad person am I, that I don't even know my own family's birthdays?" Similarly, I struggle with understanding/remembering the structure of my family tree, at least for the family members that I never met (I am often told stories about ancestors, and am shamed for my inability/unwillingness to naturally and automatically memorize them). So I broke the family tree up into individual relations and made Anki cards of them. That worked a little better than the birthdays, but still a struggle, because it is "meaningless information" as far as my own brain is concerned. I might consciously think it's important to have knowledge of your ancestry, but my neurology apparently disagrees... Alas!