I was given an Ancestry.com DNA kit a while back. My sister-in-law had ordered an extra, so she just gave it to me. It took several months before I got around to sending it in, and then the first was lost in the mail, so I had to get another resent. The results just came back today.  

I already knew most of the info they gave, but at least I can say they were reasonably accurate. 

I’m Sicilian on my mom’s side, and American on my dad’s. I’ve been to Sicily to meet my mom’s family, so I’m well aware of my ancestry on the maternal side. 

My father’s side got to the States in colonial times. They came from the usual Scottish/English stock and have been here long enough that I don’t bother trying to refer back to English heritage. I figure if your family has been in a place for over 250 years, you can go ahead and just say you’re from that place, which in my case, is “American”. 

Anyway, the ‘ethnicity estimate’ is pretty interesting. They even pegged the specific spots in Sicily. 

The ethnicity inheritance is split correctly too. My dad’s side is all the northern European ethnicities: England, Scotland, Wales, Sweden and Denmark. 
Mom’s side is the southern: Italy, Greek and Aegean Islands, and north Africa. All of which one might expect from Sicily, which was central to the Mediterranean, and which the Greeks had colonized some 3000 years ago. 

They even got the specific areas in Sicily that my mom’s side was from- the Trapani province. Both my grandfather and grandmother were from neighboring towns in that region, and that’s where the bulk of my family still resides, though some have gone north to find work in Milan. 

On my father’s side, I knew he was born in Newport News, Virginia, and that the family had been there since colonial times. I didn’t know much more than that. But that lines up with what Ancestry got: Delaware and Chesapeake Bay Settlers, then moving on to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. 

All in all, no revelations, but it’s still kind of fun to do. 

I remember some ads Ancestry was running some years ago, and they had pitches like: “I found my father’s family” or some such. I was like: your father’s family? I would think it wouldn’t be that hard to know about your father’s family… you could just… ask your father. 

Kind of reminds me of an old Doonesbury cartoon where one of the characters, Clyde, having watched the Roots series, is intent on finding his own genealogy. He is in the library doing some research when one of his friends comes in and ribs him by saying: Hey Clyde, you figured out who your father is yet? 

It says something about our society: we have a lot of really disconnected families. 

I’ll tell you a personal story that illustrates this. In 2000, I took my mom and grandmother back to Sicily. While there, I met tons of family- probably around 120 relatives or so. That’s a lot to keep track of, so we put together a family tree to keep track of who was who and how they were related to us. Out of my grandfather’s family of 9 brothers and sisters, 2 brothers (my grandfather and his brother) came to America. One went to Argentina, but came back after a while. So we decided we’d put together a family tree of the two that came to America. When we tried to put together the family tree, it was a mess. Out of all the family here, my wife and I were the only ones who weren’t divorced. Nearly everyone else had multiple marriages, children out of wedlock… in short, it was a mess to try and sort through. That’s when we noticed the striking fact that there had not been ONE divorce in all the family in Italy. 

That’s my personal anecdote to the realization of how fractured our families have become.  

I get that in probably every ‘new world’ country, where immigration played such a large part of our history, there will be some basic desire for grounding; and by that I mean knowing something more about your past before families immigrated, and how you fit in. There is something cool about this. Do you know I’ve found mention of my family’s home town of Trapani in the Aeneid? That’s awesome to think that their city has been around that long. What does that mean for ME and who I am now? Nothing, to be honest. 

The good side of this state of events that has inspired our desire for grounding, is the American promise that this is a new land and a new start.
We aren’t tied to the old, so we can make whatever we want of our lives. There’s much more beauty in that, I’m convinced, but I also get that it’s nice to find that grounding in the past.