Pay No Attention

Family Reunion

As regular readers of this blog might recall, a couple of months ago,  I stumbled across a cousin on the internet whom I'd never met.  He and I exchanged a few emails, and a week or so later, I received an email from another cousin (Lorrie) whom I'd never met.  She was the daughter of my great-aunt Helen, who is the last living sibling of my grandmother (my mother's mother).  Lorrie and I exchanged a few emails, spoke on the phone, and decided to get at least some of the family together for a mini-reunion on Saturday.  Unfortunately, there was a blizzard on Saturday that dropped two feet of snow on Western New York, so we had to reschedule for Monday.

Yesterday, at last, a smaller group of us -- Great-aunt Helen, her daughters Lorrie and Arlene, her son Terry, Arlene's husband Fred, another cousin, Florence, who is the daughter of my great-aunt Celia (my grandmother's sister), my mother, father and I -- managed to get together for a mini-reunion at cousin Lorrie's house, and it was really great.  Unfortunately, since it was a Monday, the others who planned to attend (including my brother's family) couldn't come.  However, I'm heading back to Manhattan today, so yesterday was our only option.

I really liked all my "new" relatives, and feel like I missed out by not knowing them sooner.  They're a lively, fun, interesting bunch. Lorrie and great-aunt Helen gave me a bunch of photos of my great-grandparents, grandparents and other relatives (I may post a photo or two once I get them downloaded), and the conversation never lagged. 

I never really knew my grandmother very well, and had never met my great-aunt Helen.  I'm not going to go into details here (it would make a great book, though . . .), but apparently my grandmother was the family rebel, and her sister Helen was the only one in the family she remained close to.  My mother knew her aunt Helen as a child and young woman, but hadn't seen her in many years.  However, my mother told me how wonderful great aunt Helen was to her and her siblings when they were growing up. 

Great-aunt Helen is 90 years old, and I can just say that I hope I'm as elegant and articulate as she is when I'm 90.  Seriously, she's just fantastic, has a great sense of humor and she looks terrific.  She made us some waffle cookies -- I have no idea what they're called, but they're deep-fried and dusted with powdered sugar, and I ate about 400 of them, which could endanger my chances of having a slim figure like hers when I'm 90.  And there's an excellent chance I will be around and kicking at 90, by the way -- I have great blood.  Helen's sister Celia died 17 days short of her 100th birthday.  At least two or three of her siblings lived well into their 90s, as did both my great-grandparents.  Actually, the only one of that rather huge family who didn't live into her 80s was my own grandmother, and that wasn't for genetic reasons.

We're going to schedule a larger reunion this summer.  There's a whole gang of cousins I've never met, and they sound great.

Roots

I am descended entirely from immigrants who came to this country in the early 20th century, and like many people with such a background, I don't know much about my family.  To top it off, my family for the most part didn't stay in touch with their relatives either here or in Europe.  My paternal grandfather was an exception to that rule, but unfortunately when he died, so did the family connections. As a result, my branch of the family is largely marooned off from the other branches. 

I must be some kind of throwback freak because I have a ravenous curiosity about where my ancestors came from and what they were like.  Therefore, I've been spending a lot of time researching my family tree, collecting documents, and as you will have seen from my previous post, even testing my DNA for information about my deep genetic ancestry.  I've done about as much as I can do at the moment on Ancestry.com, so I have been plugging family names into the internet just to see what comes up.  I hit pay dirt with this method on one or two occasions.  For example, I discovered that one of my grandfathers had been in Haller's Army, a group of Polish American soldiers who returned to Poland to fight in World War I.  http://www.hallersarmy.com/   None of his children knew about this, and I wouldn't know it either if I hadn't stumbled across his name on a list of Haller's Army veterans.  I sent away for his army records, and sure enough, it was my grandfather.  Those records enabled me to add quite a bit of unexpected information for my grandfather.

Anyway, yesterday I was doing a search for one of my great-grandfathers, just for the heck of it, and stumbled across a website for some really cool artistic postcards.  http://wojoart.com/default.htm  On the welcome page, there was a photo of my great-grandfather (he was quite distinctive-looking and I recognized him immediately from a family photograph one of my aunts had given me), along with a mosaic gravestone he'd created.  I knew that my great-grandfather and his family had been artisans and craftspeople, but to my lasting regret, I never knew them or knew much about them.  However, as I looked at the website, it was clear to me that whoever had created this website must also be descended from my great-grandfather. 

Although I've occasionally stumbled across names of probable unknown cousins before, I haven't really felt compelled to contact them, but something about this website inspired me.  I contacted the owner of the website, and sure enough, he's my second cousin.  He seems like a really interesting guy too -- in addition to being an artist, he spent more than twenty years in the FBI, is now a private investigator, and apparently also has a brewery where he made a commemorative ale named after our great-grandfather.  We've exchanged a few emails, and I'm really hoping I'll meet him and his family at some point.

Don't blame me for Genghis Khan or Marie Antoinette

Go ahead and call me a geek.   It won't be the first or the last time.  I had my mitochondrial DNA tested and my father's Y chromosome DNA tested to learn more about my deep genetic background, and I think it is the coolest thing ever.  If you can afford $100 for a kit, and are as geeky as I am, I highly recommend that you do it.  https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

I really don't care if I'm related to Marie Antoinette, and I'm a little dubious about the companies that test DNA with that in mind.  I went with National Geographic's Genographic Project because, first, I trust National Geographic is conducting a genuine operation rather than a scam, and second, because my DNA (and the cost of testing it) will go into a global project that is exploring the human journey across the world over the last 60,000 years.  So rather than learning about my relationship to Genghis Khan, I'm finding out where my most distant ancestors originated, when they emerged from Africa and where they dispersed after that, up until about 10,000 years ago, and I'm helping scientists learn more about the human race. 

My father's father's father's father's etc. is from haplogroup I1b1b, which is a fairly uncommon haplogroup that many experts believe is associated with the spread of the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Megalith culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalith in Western Europe.  My father's people emerged from Africa around 50,000 years ago, and then chilled out in the Middle East for a while before spreading out and building Stonehenge-y things in places like north-western Iberia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_I1b_(Y-DNA)#I1b1b  My mother's mother's mother's mother's mother is from haplogroup W, a fairly rare haplogroup that emerged from the very first group of humans to leave Africa some 60,000 years ago, then hung out in the Near East for a while, and eventually made their way up to Northern Europe and Western Eurasia (although weirdly, there are a few stray members of this haplogroup in pockets of Thailand and India).   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_W_(mtDNA)   How cool is that?  And can I admit that I'm rather pleased that both parents emerged from rather unusual haplogroups?

If you're interested, you can get a kit at the link in the first paragraph of my post.  You get your results online about six weeks after you complete your DNA kit and send it in.  You get a nifty map showing your ancestors' path out of Africa, a certificate with your haplogroup and some specific information about your DNA, and a little history of your haplogroup's migrations.  By the way, once you know your haplogroup and the genetic mutations, you can figure out whether you are related to Genghis Khan or Marie Antoinette.  I'm not.