Why?
If you’re in the US, you should know this because if you want to apply for a passport, you’ll be required to provide information about your parents such as birth dates and places. If you’re divorced, you will have to provide the same info along with marriage and divorce date, even if it was decades ago. So if you have access to that info, make sure you record it somewhere safe for Future use.
If you’re not in the US, you should know because this information can be difficult for people to get if they never knew one or both parents, or have a bad/non-relationship with them. Or if they had a contentious divorce or an abusive partner. Which is another reason why just leaving the country can be difficult for people who are already marginalized.
Americans are not fans of centralized information on the population. It doesn’t help that the corporate equivalent to Voldemort is trying to sell it as a means of “law and order”. Something every American understands is meant to screw with us. Literally every time we give the government a new database they abuse it. The most recent is connecting a medical database to immigration enforcement.
So yeah. If we could stop electing people under the motto, “The Cruelty Is The Point”, then we could have nice things.