I made a visit to see my baby sister and the two of us found the grave of our maternal great grandmother Martha Sixkiller, in Bunch Cemetery in the midst of the Cookson Hills of the Cherokee Nation. I come from those who colonized this land and from those who had lived here for centuries when the colonizers arrived. I’d always known this but somehow being in eastern Oklahoma once called the Indian Territory where my ancestors were marched to from their homelands brought it all home to me, a driven girl, who grew up on the road. Epigenetic insight is powerful.
Hi Sari! I enjoyed your post. My story: two years after writing a CNF piece about my great-aunt Czarna, who was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and her son Joseph, who survived as a hidden child in France, I was contacted by a woman in Corsica doing research on her grandmother who was “abandoned at birth” (her words). I was skeptical at first, but after exchanging many documents and doing a DNA test, it turns out Czarna had a baby out of wedlock that no one in the family knew about and we have an entire branch of the family in France/Corsica. I went to meet one of my cousins earlier this year!
Wonderful story! I love the *literal shivers.* I got some of those when a friend and I were traveling through Ithaca, NY, during a time in my twenties when I was estranged from my parents. My beloved great-great Aunt Louise and other relatives were from Ithaca, I remembered from the many letters I wrote to her as a child and teenager (I only met her in person once, when I was a year and a half old).
I couldn't ask Mom where Aunt Louise was buried because we weren't speaking. This was before Findagrave.com and all that. My friend and I searched the Catholic cemetery in town for an hour, then gave up. Driving our way out of Ithaca back to the West Coast, a few miles out maybe, I shouted, "STOP HERE!"
My friend, startled, stopped the car. I stepped out the door, walked up a hill directly to Aunt Louise's grave, which apparently had a magnetic effect on my body. Her death date had never been etched into the stone, which she and her sister had purchased while still alive. I used the yellow pages (!) to find an engraver who took my money, and hopefully went out there and carved the right date in.
Tiffany! What an amazing post!!! You can’t let it end there! You’ve gotta check the website you mentioned: findagrave.com to see if your hired engraver added “the dash” and date to your Aunt Louise’s headstone!!!
Not only do I honor you for wanting to find out where your Aunt’s resting place was located (that’s a wow in itself!) but I’m positive learning “the rest of the story!” (and sharing it with us) :) will bring you much peace, as you did such a good thing in wanting to make showing her time on this earth truly did matter!
Here’s a poem about “that dash” that can’t help but touch our hearts. Thank you again for sharing a piece of your history with us! My pray is that you and your Mom will reconcile over your own inquisitiveness of your families history. It is the tie that binds us all to our past and creates the values that are shared between and among us, which results in a unique and unbreakable connection and bond! 🙏🏻 GBY and yours!
The Dash
by Linda Ellis
I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning to the end.
He noted first came the date of the birth and spoke the following date with tears.
But he said what mattered most of all was the dash between the years.
For that dash represents all the time that they spent life on Earth.
And now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.
For it matters not how much we own, the cars, the house, the cash.
What matters is how we live and love, and how we spend our dash.
So, think about this long and hard. Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left that can still be rearranged.
If we could just slow down enough to consider what’s true and real,
and always try to understand the way other people feel.
Be less quick to anger and show appreciation more,
and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before.
If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile,
remembering that this special dash might only last a little while.
So, when your eulogy is being read with your life’s actions to rehash,
would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash?
I haven’t taken any DNA tests and I’m not Jewish but somehow I got onto the “Tracing the Tribe” Facebook page and have been following many fascinating stories down this very busy rabbit hole. For many people there this is no idle fixation, but a real effort to remember and document lives and life lost in the Holocaust and dispersal all over the globe. It’s absolutely remarkable what can be found and what remains a mystery. Names change and change again but new archives are being posted all the time….even from Ukraine. The people at Tracing are very helpful and able to read many languages and can often decipher the strangest scrawls! They also talk about the differences among the several DNA testing services and what can be found out.
I also belong to Tracing the Tribe and a member there helped me with suggestions for finding the location of the shtetl (village) where my grandfather was born. It’s such an amazing group.
Of all the folks I know who’ve gone down this road, your stories are the best.
I discovered I am 12% Native American, which stunned me and every living relative i informed. I found out I share DNA with Thomas Jefferson, about which I have mixed feelings. Also a famed pirate named William Dampier. An extravagantly horrible human. I found my great great grandfather’s military records from his time in the Confederacy, which of course evokes more horror. I found several census records showing my Sicilian-immigrant grandfather’s status as a child (10 years old) then a typesetter (20) then an editor (30). I found housepainters, clerks, writers, civil servants, rogues, heroic women who bore many children, folks who squeezed into steerage on massive ships with nothing but their names an a wild kind of hope. The Luccheses - the aforementioned grandfather’s people - were famed Sicilian bootmakers who came over to make boots for the cavalry in Texas (more mixed feelings), and stayed. Sam Lucchese, my grandfather, had no interest in bootmaking. He wanted to be - get this - a writer. And he was.
Wow, Robert. You've got writer roots, no surprise. And so many other interesting bits of family history. Thanks for sharing. PS Maybe it's time to honor your pirate roots with some blousy swashbuckling shirts.
This is a marvelous and haunting story, Sari. I’d love to read this memoir. I tend to be highly skeptical of the recent American penchant for genetics and genealogy, which (to me) has a whiff of the eugenicist and which—as a lesbian—never seemed to be the link that mattered most, when my truest family was made by love not legal bonds or links of blood. But your story makes me a believer; haunted and haunting. <3
Family bonds made of love are the best, because you choose each other. I hope you will write your story, so future generations will see how wonderful your family were.
Thank you, Kate, if you refer to mine!! I’m writing it now, even as the story took a very unexpected turn midlife. I so appreciate your encouraging words, as I head to the desk today to conclude what I hope is it’s final draft.
What I discovered when Ancestry and others came onto the scene blew apart many family myths...so much so that I had to pivot from writing one book to writing another about this interesting family of mine - the ones I never knew. Lots of work - emotion - regret -
What a cool set of coincidences Sari. And I LOVE the pics. I discovered so much last year...that my mother had a step brother, that my grandparents weren't married when they had my uncle, which...in the 30's I assume was a big deal. Discussions afterwards about things that happened to my deceased mother were extremely upsetting and illuminating for me...at the age of 50. No regrets about finding it all out, but my heart ached for my mother and all that she held inside and to her grave.
Wow, those are some weird coincidences for you! Thank you for sharing. I also did the Ancestry & 23&Me thing about 10 years ago. I didn't discover anything shocking (although the DNA says I'm 65% Scottish which...huh?? That was surprising). But, I did find some interesting things.
I had no idea one of my great-grandfathers who I actually knew as a kid was the youngest of 13 kids. HIS father was listed in the 1860 US Census as "illegitimate." That was kind of odd, to see something like that written down. I have massive amts of DNA matches from this branch.
One branch immigrated to the US from Germany around 1870 or so, and records are very hard to follow, because they switched back and forth between the "German" name and the "American" name. In some records, they're Johann, in others they're John, and they were all named John/variations of for generations, so it's hard to figure out who is who. On that side, I found where one of the Johns had sued his own mother over land ownership, and saw all the court filings.
One of my grandmothers' family had money but I never knew where it came from. Her grandfather had made a small fortune taking people west on wagon trains (settlers) and then returning to Missouri. Like 1883 (tv show) or something!
I could go on about small interesting things but in the end I know it's not interesting to anyone but me. But pretty much all my family has been in the US since the 1700s except the one German branch. I "met" several distant cousins who offered to give me their Daughters of the American Revolution paperwork for our shared ancestors so I could join (I've got several who were in the war). Eh, I passed on that.
A long-ago 23andme report showed me I had far less Native American blood than previously assumed, but some West African no one had ever mentioned. Also, there was a considerable chunk of Iberian Peninsula.
Around that time, a relative sent me an article torn from the pages of The Economist, about the multiracial group the Melungeons (East Kentucky etc). The relative scribbled in the margin, "Granny's people." The article noted that Melungeons claim "Portugee" heritage, among others. Portuguese! On the Iberian Peninsula!
I reckon that as they left Kentucky and their cozy multiracial group, people like Granny played up their indigenous heritage to account for any dark skin or non-Northern-European-looking facial features, while conveniently failing to mention the Black portions of their heritage (enslaved people). It's a small amount, blood-wise, but I still don't know what to do with this information.
It made me feel more connected to my country, though. I'm descended from a slaver, it turns out, but also from an enslaved person. I'd also spent time volunteering in Senegal, in West Africa, and feeling that I might have a blood connection there seemed powerful too.
I’ve been on something of an off-and-on genealogy kick ever since my LDS wife got a free Ancestry.com subscription. One of my relatives on my dad’s side ran a full search on our name. It confirmed that we fled from Ukraine in the late 1800s and settled in Philadelphia just before WWI. However, the trail’s cold even with that list of names. And public records can be confusing. My grandmother is listed on two separate birth certificates as being from Sweden and New Jersey, for instance.
It’s incredibly frustrating. Almost all my relatives are gone now, and they left almost no documentation. It’s as if they never existed and had no illusions about their legacy. It’s a completely different mindset from my wife and me, who’ve documented almost everything for posterity. I can only guess what my ancestors’ lives were like in pre-WWII Philly.
Ultimately the best genealogist in the world won’t tell me what I really want to know: why was my dad the way he was? What was his childhood like, and why was he so emotionally distant? Who was this guy, and what did I inherit from him? For that, I guess I’ll have to hope for an afterlife.
I agree, that even when you have the facts and perhaps a photo or two, the information that would be really special is their intellectual autobiography - what did they think of their lives, their experiences and the people around them.
So it is great to hear that you have documented your lives. I feel that sometimes people spend so much time tracing their ancestors, that they fail to leave sufficient information for their ancestry hunters.
Oh my gosh your tree branch story is wild!! They were being so literal!
In my family 23&Me turned up our long-lost cousin who we knew had been given up for adoption through Catholic Charities in the early 70s. It was thrilling and has been healing for my other cousins, her siblings, to connect with her.
But even before DNA registries there were some genealogical skeletons that came knocking. When I was in fourth grade we did a project tracing our relatives back to our great-great-grandparents. We were supposed to fill all the names in on a drawing of a tree. On my dad’s side everything was normal but things started to get weird on my mom’s side. Half of the great-great-grandparents all had the exact same names. I kept getting confused and insisted there was a mistake and finally my mom just threw up her hands and said “my parents were first cousins, honey, got it?” I didn’t really, but when she suggested I leave that part of the tree blank I got the message that we weren’t supposed to talk about it. So I did. All the time. It drove her bananas!
I grew up in a family that, on my father's side, talked a lot about family history. And my grandmother knew a lot about our family's history, both her own and her husband's. I knew that my ancestry dated back to the earliest days of New Amsterdam. In fact, my most recent immigrant relative was my great-grandfather, who came to NYC from Denmark about 1870.
After inheriting much of the family historical documents from both sides of my family, I began cataloguing everything, scanning it to Ancestry.com and documenting my tree. I knew my Dutch roots went deep in the Northeast, but one really neat discovery is that it included the Rikers of Rikers Island. A few years ago I arranged to visit the old Riker home (c 1656), which still exists in Queens, right alongside the busy road that goes to the jail now housed there. I believe it's the oldest house still standing in NYC that remains a residential home. https://www.rikerhome.com
Love this! I found out 1 big surprise - I have a good amount of French Canadian, and by extension French, ancestry. This would not be notable except that when I fell in love with French and found a way to make it my profession, everyone on all sides thought I was some kind of anomaly. And this ancestry doesn't go all that far back in the great scheme of history-late 1800s. Also, not so much a discovery as a connection. My grandmother's half-sister, who lives in Australia now, and I have used the internet for a good thing and really connected. It feels like we're healing some old family wounds, somehow
In Scotland there is a tradition of 'first footing', which means the first person to step inside the house after midnight. For good luck in the coming year the first visitor should be a dark haired man. That was because fair haired Vikings invaded Scotland in the 8th and 9th century, bringing death and destruction, so a fair haired man was not a good omen.
My family proudly touted their Italian heritage, and since both sides can be traced to specific towns in Italy, I never doubted my DNA’s purity. 23 and Me set me straight. I’m 59% Italian, 17% Greek, and the rest Western Asian (think Turkey and Iran).
I can hear my father if he were alive—“Aw, they’re fulla sh*t.” I would have loved to have that conversation!
I made a visit to see my baby sister and the two of us found the grave of our maternal great grandmother Martha Sixkiller, in Bunch Cemetery in the midst of the Cookson Hills of the Cherokee Nation. I come from those who colonized this land and from those who had lived here for centuries when the colonizers arrived. I’d always known this but somehow being in eastern Oklahoma once called the Indian Territory where my ancestors were marched to from their homelands brought it all home to me, a driven girl, who grew up on the road. Epigenetic insight is powerful.
Fascinating, Chris.
The story is the backbone of Driven, my newly completed experimental memoir.
I look forward to reading it.
Hi Sari! I enjoyed your post. My story: two years after writing a CNF piece about my great-aunt Czarna, who was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and her son Joseph, who survived as a hidden child in France, I was contacted by a woman in Corsica doing research on her grandmother who was “abandoned at birth” (her words). I was skeptical at first, but after exchanging many documents and doing a DNA test, it turns out Czarna had a baby out of wedlock that no one in the family knew about and we have an entire branch of the family in France/Corsica. I went to meet one of my cousins earlier this year!
Here’s my original essay: https://jwa.org/blog/czarna
And here’s the one I wrote after we learned the news: https://jwa.org/blog/czarna-reimagined
Wow!!!! Thanks for the links, too.
Thanks!
Oh my goodness, so riveting!
Thanks, Peg!
Wonderful story! I love the *literal shivers.* I got some of those when a friend and I were traveling through Ithaca, NY, during a time in my twenties when I was estranged from my parents. My beloved great-great Aunt Louise and other relatives were from Ithaca, I remembered from the many letters I wrote to her as a child and teenager (I only met her in person once, when I was a year and a half old).
I couldn't ask Mom where Aunt Louise was buried because we weren't speaking. This was before Findagrave.com and all that. My friend and I searched the Catholic cemetery in town for an hour, then gave up. Driving our way out of Ithaca back to the West Coast, a few miles out maybe, I shouted, "STOP HERE!"
My friend, startled, stopped the car. I stepped out the door, walked up a hill directly to Aunt Louise's grave, which apparently had a magnetic effect on my body. Her death date had never been etched into the stone, which she and her sister had purchased while still alive. I used the yellow pages (!) to find an engraver who took my money, and hopefully went out there and carved the right date in.
Tiffany! What an amazing post!!! You can’t let it end there! You’ve gotta check the website you mentioned: findagrave.com to see if your hired engraver added “the dash” and date to your Aunt Louise’s headstone!!!
Not only do I honor you for wanting to find out where your Aunt’s resting place was located (that’s a wow in itself!) but I’m positive learning “the rest of the story!” (and sharing it with us) :) will bring you much peace, as you did such a good thing in wanting to make showing her time on this earth truly did matter!
Here’s a poem about “that dash” that can’t help but touch our hearts. Thank you again for sharing a piece of your history with us! My pray is that you and your Mom will reconcile over your own inquisitiveness of your families history. It is the tie that binds us all to our past and creates the values that are shared between and among us, which results in a unique and unbreakable connection and bond! 🙏🏻 GBY and yours!
The Dash
by Linda Ellis
I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning to the end.
He noted first came the date of the birth and spoke the following date with tears.
But he said what mattered most of all was the dash between the years.
For that dash represents all the time that they spent life on Earth.
And now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.
For it matters not how much we own, the cars, the house, the cash.
What matters is how we live and love, and how we spend our dash.
So, think about this long and hard. Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left that can still be rearranged.
If we could just slow down enough to consider what’s true and real,
and always try to understand the way other people feel.
Be less quick to anger and show appreciation more,
and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before.
If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile,
remembering that this special dash might only last a little while.
So, when your eulogy is being read with your life’s actions to rehash,
would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash?
Very nice! Thanks. I reconciled with my mom many years ago. :-)
I haven’t taken any DNA tests and I’m not Jewish but somehow I got onto the “Tracing the Tribe” Facebook page and have been following many fascinating stories down this very busy rabbit hole. For many people there this is no idle fixation, but a real effort to remember and document lives and life lost in the Holocaust and dispersal all over the globe. It’s absolutely remarkable what can be found and what remains a mystery. Names change and change again but new archives are being posted all the time….even from Ukraine. The people at Tracing are very helpful and able to read many languages and can often decipher the strangest scrawls! They also talk about the differences among the several DNA testing services and what can be found out.
I also belong to Tracing the Tribe and a member there helped me with suggestions for finding the location of the shtetl (village) where my grandfather was born. It’s such an amazing group.
Oh, I need to get on Tracing the Tribe!
The founder is a Baltimorean I know named Jennifer Mendelson. She is an extraordinary human being. Check out: https://www.apgen.org/users/jennifer-mendelsohn
Of all the folks I know who’ve gone down this road, your stories are the best.
I discovered I am 12% Native American, which stunned me and every living relative i informed. I found out I share DNA with Thomas Jefferson, about which I have mixed feelings. Also a famed pirate named William Dampier. An extravagantly horrible human. I found my great great grandfather’s military records from his time in the Confederacy, which of course evokes more horror. I found several census records showing my Sicilian-immigrant grandfather’s status as a child (10 years old) then a typesetter (20) then an editor (30). I found housepainters, clerks, writers, civil servants, rogues, heroic women who bore many children, folks who squeezed into steerage on massive ships with nothing but their names an a wild kind of hope. The Luccheses - the aforementioned grandfather’s people - were famed Sicilian bootmakers who came over to make boots for the cavalry in Texas (more mixed feelings), and stayed. Sam Lucchese, my grandfather, had no interest in bootmaking. He wanted to be - get this - a writer. And he was.
Wow, Robert. You've got writer roots, no surprise. And so many other interesting bits of family history. Thanks for sharing. PS Maybe it's time to honor your pirate roots with some blousy swashbuckling shirts.
I own so many swashbuckling shirts already! Even a bona fide PUFFY SHIRT. Now I more fully understand my 80s New Romantic phase.
I think I might have seen you in said PUFFY SHIRT at some point of the years. Yes, it's all in your DNA. 🏴☠️
This is a marvelous and haunting story, Sari. I’d love to read this memoir. I tend to be highly skeptical of the recent American penchant for genetics and genealogy, which (to me) has a whiff of the eugenicist and which—as a lesbian—never seemed to be the link that mattered most, when my truest family was made by love not legal bonds or links of blood. But your story makes me a believer; haunted and haunting. <3
Thanks, E.J. <3
Family bonds made of love are the best, because you choose each other. I hope you will write your story, so future generations will see how wonderful your family were.
Thank you, Kate, if you refer to mine!! I’m writing it now, even as the story took a very unexpected turn midlife. I so appreciate your encouraging words, as I head to the desk today to conclude what I hope is it’s final draft.
What I discovered when Ancestry and others came onto the scene blew apart many family myths...so much so that I had to pivot from writing one book to writing another about this interesting family of mine - the ones I never knew. Lots of work - emotion - regret -
What a cool set of coincidences Sari. And I LOVE the pics. I discovered so much last year...that my mother had a step brother, that my grandparents weren't married when they had my uncle, which...in the 30's I assume was a big deal. Discussions afterwards about things that happened to my deceased mother were extremely upsetting and illuminating for me...at the age of 50. No regrets about finding it all out, but my heart ached for my mother and all that she held inside and to her grave.
<3
Wow, those are some weird coincidences for you! Thank you for sharing. I also did the Ancestry & 23&Me thing about 10 years ago. I didn't discover anything shocking (although the DNA says I'm 65% Scottish which...huh?? That was surprising). But, I did find some interesting things.
I had no idea one of my great-grandfathers who I actually knew as a kid was the youngest of 13 kids. HIS father was listed in the 1860 US Census as "illegitimate." That was kind of odd, to see something like that written down. I have massive amts of DNA matches from this branch.
One branch immigrated to the US from Germany around 1870 or so, and records are very hard to follow, because they switched back and forth between the "German" name and the "American" name. In some records, they're Johann, in others they're John, and they were all named John/variations of for generations, so it's hard to figure out who is who. On that side, I found where one of the Johns had sued his own mother over land ownership, and saw all the court filings.
One of my grandmothers' family had money but I never knew where it came from. Her grandfather had made a small fortune taking people west on wagon trains (settlers) and then returning to Missouri. Like 1883 (tv show) or something!
I could go on about small interesting things but in the end I know it's not interesting to anyone but me. But pretty much all my family has been in the US since the 1700s except the one German branch. I "met" several distant cousins who offered to give me their Daughters of the American Revolution paperwork for our shared ancestors so I could join (I've got several who were in the war). Eh, I passed on that.
Being Scottish is awesome! Welcome.
A long-ago 23andme report showed me I had far less Native American blood than previously assumed, but some West African no one had ever mentioned. Also, there was a considerable chunk of Iberian Peninsula.
Around that time, a relative sent me an article torn from the pages of The Economist, about the multiracial group the Melungeons (East Kentucky etc). The relative scribbled in the margin, "Granny's people." The article noted that Melungeons claim "Portugee" heritage, among others. Portuguese! On the Iberian Peninsula!
I reckon that as they left Kentucky and their cozy multiracial group, people like Granny played up their indigenous heritage to account for any dark skin or non-Northern-European-looking facial features, while conveniently failing to mention the Black portions of their heritage (enslaved people). It's a small amount, blood-wise, but I still don't know what to do with this information.
It made me feel more connected to my country, though. I'm descended from a slaver, it turns out, but also from an enslaved person. I'd also spent time volunteering in Senegal, in West Africa, and feeling that I might have a blood connection there seemed powerful too.
Interesting!!!
I’ve been on something of an off-and-on genealogy kick ever since my LDS wife got a free Ancestry.com subscription. One of my relatives on my dad’s side ran a full search on our name. It confirmed that we fled from Ukraine in the late 1800s and settled in Philadelphia just before WWI. However, the trail’s cold even with that list of names. And public records can be confusing. My grandmother is listed on two separate birth certificates as being from Sweden and New Jersey, for instance.
It’s incredibly frustrating. Almost all my relatives are gone now, and they left almost no documentation. It’s as if they never existed and had no illusions about their legacy. It’s a completely different mindset from my wife and me, who’ve documented almost everything for posterity. I can only guess what my ancestors’ lives were like in pre-WWII Philly.
Ultimately the best genealogist in the world won’t tell me what I really want to know: why was my dad the way he was? What was his childhood like, and why was he so emotionally distant? Who was this guy, and what did I inherit from him? For that, I guess I’ll have to hope for an afterlife.
I agree, that even when you have the facts and perhaps a photo or two, the information that would be really special is their intellectual autobiography - what did they think of their lives, their experiences and the people around them.
So it is great to hear that you have documented your lives. I feel that sometimes people spend so much time tracing their ancestors, that they fail to leave sufficient information for their ancestry hunters.
Oh my gosh your tree branch story is wild!! They were being so literal!
In my family 23&Me turned up our long-lost cousin who we knew had been given up for adoption through Catholic Charities in the early 70s. It was thrilling and has been healing for my other cousins, her siblings, to connect with her.
But even before DNA registries there were some genealogical skeletons that came knocking. When I was in fourth grade we did a project tracing our relatives back to our great-great-grandparents. We were supposed to fill all the names in on a drawing of a tree. On my dad’s side everything was normal but things started to get weird on my mom’s side. Half of the great-great-grandparents all had the exact same names. I kept getting confused and insisted there was a mistake and finally my mom just threw up her hands and said “my parents were first cousins, honey, got it?” I didn’t really, but when she suggested I leave that part of the tree blank I got the message that we weren’t supposed to talk about it. So I did. All the time. It drove her bananas!
Yes, very literal. And on my maternal grandfather’s side, my great grandparents were cousins. Shtetl living…
I grew up in a family that, on my father's side, talked a lot about family history. And my grandmother knew a lot about our family's history, both her own and her husband's. I knew that my ancestry dated back to the earliest days of New Amsterdam. In fact, my most recent immigrant relative was my great-grandfather, who came to NYC from Denmark about 1870.
After inheriting much of the family historical documents from both sides of my family, I began cataloguing everything, scanning it to Ancestry.com and documenting my tree. I knew my Dutch roots went deep in the Northeast, but one really neat discovery is that it included the Rikers of Rikers Island. A few years ago I arranged to visit the old Riker home (c 1656), which still exists in Queens, right alongside the busy road that goes to the jail now housed there. I believe it's the oldest house still standing in NYC that remains a residential home. https://www.rikerhome.com
Interesting!
Love this! I found out 1 big surprise - I have a good amount of French Canadian, and by extension French, ancestry. This would not be notable except that when I fell in love with French and found a way to make it my profession, everyone on all sides thought I was some kind of anomaly. And this ancestry doesn't go all that far back in the great scheme of history-late 1800s. Also, not so much a discovery as a connection. My grandmother's half-sister, who lives in Australia now, and I have used the internet for a good thing and really connected. It feels like we're healing some old family wounds, somehow
Marauding vikings explains why my siblings have blond hair, nothing to do with the milkman
In Scotland there is a tradition of 'first footing', which means the first person to step inside the house after midnight. For good luck in the coming year the first visitor should be a dark haired man. That was because fair haired Vikings invaded Scotland in the 8th and 9th century, bringing death and destruction, so a fair haired man was not a good omen.
My family proudly touted their Italian heritage, and since both sides can be traced to specific towns in Italy, I never doubted my DNA’s purity. 23 and Me set me straight. I’m 59% Italian, 17% Greek, and the rest Western Asian (think Turkey and Iran).
I can hear my father if he were alive—“Aw, they’re fulla sh*t.” I would have loved to have that conversation!
Ha!