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I think he was going to do something that was going to cause some kind of problem for his descendants. (I feel like maybe it was a reputational thing, like he made a bad name for himself and all of his eventual descendants; but maybe I'm making that up.) So they go back in time and kidnap him and trap him on a ship (an oceangoing ship, not a spaceship) for his whole life against his will, to stop him from doing the thing. He resents his confinement, especially over something so relatively trivial, but he can't do anything about it. He spends the rest of his life on this ship, with his descendants. At the end of his life, he points out to them that they forgot to give him the opportunity to actually bear any children, so after all their effort to fix their problem, all they've accomplished is retroactively killing themselves. (He deliberately didn't tell them until it was too late, because he resented them that much.)
I don't remember when I read it, but it was probably less than ten years ago. I feel like the story itself was older than that, though; it had the vibe of classic science fiction (i.e. 40s-70s) more than modern science fiction. But, I might be wrong about that.