Petz...

The nature of Petz as easily-shared, individual files, that contain records of ancestry, day of adoption, memories, etc, leads to some really poignant little things, like individual Petz being living relics of fan-culture history.

See Skissor's pet Jack, as described on Skissor's website "Alive Enough":

Interested in learning about the handsome fellow known as Jack? Well you've come to the right place. Ever since the day I adopted him, Jack has been my own personal petzy mascot, so it seemed only right to make him the mascot of Alive Enough.

I first met Jack in late 2014. That's when I purchased him off of PUGS from Heather of HKC. From the moment I saw him I thought he was absolutely gorgeous, and immediately snapped him up. However, once I got him out to play with, that's when I truly fell in love. Jack is so playful and charming, sweet to everyone he meets and not to mention a dream to take photos of. He quickly became my favorite pet, and has remained so to this day.

Sadly, some of Jack's ancestors had their family tree trimmed by PetzA at some point, so his full genetic history is not known. However, he still has over 239 generations in his file, with some dating all the way back to 1997. Tracking down all of Jack's ancestry would be impossible of course, however, one name did jump out at me: Anso, presumably the owner the very old site know as Anso's Petz. Over 3% of Jack's ancestry consists of Petz owned by Anso, so out of curiosity, I decided to check out the site via the wayback machine to see if I could find them. Sure enough, when looking on Anso's crew page, many of the names matched. These were some of Jack's great great ancestors.

It's pretty crazy to think about how many petz in the community have histories like this, with lines dating all the way back to when Petz 3 was first released. The fact that for over two decades, people have been continuously adopting, breeding, and sharing petz, so much so that a cat I own today has ancestors that are as old as I am? That's honestly pretty amazing.

For context. "Anso's Petz" was one of the first big Petz fansites - predating even "Carolyn's Creations," that great behemoth of one prolific woman's tutorials and downloads, the bedrock of modern hexing. I originally downloaded Carolyn Horn's hexed breedfiles off of Anso's, not Carolyn's own site - I think Anso might have actually hosted Carolyn's files before Carolyn herself did. Anso's had the first Petz 3 specific fansite on the entire web, because Anso was already deeply invested in Petz before Petz 3's release - as seen by her (I checked her about page to get her gender right) extremely dedicated pages for Petz II, as well as her pages for Dogz 1, Catz 1, and Oddballz.

To have a pet with ancestry going back to Anso's crew truly is to own a piece of history. Links may rot and people may leave, but the relics of dead sites and their owners exist as living, breathing creatures in 32 bits. Isn't that beautiful?