Thankful Sunday, March 17, 2019

I am thankful that we're all different.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today is a celebration of our Irish heritage. According to DNA analysis, Ward and I are both 20% Irish.  I look the part with red hair and freckles, but Ward doesn't with black hair and olive skin.  That's what is so interesting about genetics and our varied backgrounds. You're never sure what the almost infinite combination of genes is going to come up with. When I was younger and would lament to my mother I wanted be like one of my older sisters, my mother would always say how boring the world would be if we were all alike. She was right. So for the uniqueness of each and every person, I am thankful.

Now to add a little more about St. Patrick's day, I'm running an updated version of a post from three years ago.

  St. Patrick's Day This and That

Irish dancers in St. Patrick's Day Parade, Washington, D. C.

I usually don't do a lot to observe St. Patrick's Day except wear green--a habit that started in elementary school days to avoid being pinched. If you didn't wear green, you were fair game. I wondered how that crazy tradition got started and found out that, most likely, it was started by Irish immigrants in this country a couple hundred years ago. Supposedly, wearing green made you invisible to mischievous leprechauns who would pinch you if they could see you. A pinch from someone reminded you to be aware that a leprechaun could sneak up on you at any time.

However, it wasn't until last year that I learned about wearing orange on St. Patrick's Day. Apparently, you wear green if you are Catholic and orange if you are Protestant. A friend, whose mother is Irish, said that she was always insistent that they wear orange instead of green on St. Patrick's Day. I think that detail was lost on most of us in this country or at least me.

Shamrocks (white clover)

I learned another new thing this St. Patrick's Day--what a shamrock is. Sarah, my special buddy, gave me a shamrock plant for St. Patrick's Day. It was in a green pot from a store and labeled as a shamrock. However, it looked just like white clover to me and was not at all like my image of a shamrock. But I was surprised when I looked into it. While there is disagreement among the Irish about which variety of clover is a shamrock, it is a clover plant. Yellow clover is what most agreed on with white clover coming in second. I have a white clover plant. I'm not sure if I'm going to let it join the rest of the clover in my yard or bring it inside. I may make it a house plant.

St. Paddy's day in New Orleans ( Photo source)

And while I usually don't do a lot on St. Patrick's Day (not green beer drinker or corned beef eater), I have been to a few parades. This was especially a big event when we lived in New Orleans. The fun part about a St. Patrick's Day parade was they threw vegetables from the floats to make an Irish stew. That means that along with the beads, they threw cabbages, carrots, potatoes and onions. We usually took them home and did just that--made a stew.

We've been to one parade here and while it was enjoyable, it didn't quite live up to the vegetable throwing in New Orleans.

So as I go and figure out what green thing I'm going to wear today, I hope you have a Happy St. Patrick's Day however big or small you chose to celebrate it.

D is for DNA

A few posts ago, I made some provocative statements about finding a new relative. Of course there were questions about what the rest of the story was. I can't tell a lot of it because it's not my story to tell, but I'll try to explain what I can.

In short, through DNA and Ancestry.com, I got a new close relative. Below are the details. Or as many as I can tell. Feel free to skim or skip ahead.

My sister, let's call her Mary Ellen, had been researching our genealogy for several years and as part of that, she had her DNA tested and the results entered into to the Ancestry.com data base. In general, testing provides a breakdown of ethnicity, e.g., Irish-20%, Native American--20%, etc,. and tells you how likely it is that you are related to someone else who is in the data base. For example, your notice could say that a certain person is a 3rd or 4th cousin of yours with high confidence, or low confidence. However it's up to the parties involved if they want to be in contact with each other and share any information. One will contact the other through Ancestry and if the other party is interested, they will respond.

This picture is part of both the past
and present stories.

One day Mary Ellen received a notice that there was a very high confidence that someone was closely related to her. Up until this point, she had been able to figure out how different notices of both distant and close relatives fit into the family trees. But this one was a mystery. Mary Ellen didn't know who they were, so she contacted the other party, let's call them Cathy, to get more information.

As it turns out, Cathy was administering the information for someone, let's call him Abraham, whom she was convinced was related to her because of the many things they had in common. Cathy had Abraham take a DNA test to confirm this.  It turned out that Abraham was not related to Cathy at all, but he was related to us. Mary Ellen starting sleuthing to figure out what was going on. She talked to close and distant family members as well as studying all of her old notes. When my sister thought she might have the answer, she convinced another one of our relatives, let's call her Beatrix to take a DNA test to test her hypothesis. And Mary Ellen was right.

Or in short, a man we thought was our grandfather wasn't, and some other stranger was.

Suddenly, many things from the past became a lot clearer. Big things and subtle things we had never noticed before, now made sense. It took a while for all of us to process this new data. Our family story that we had identified with forever was now different. It was a strange feeling.

In the midst of readjusting our thinking, I realized something important. Colon cancer was no longer in our family history and we could have colonoscopies on a regular schedule now instead of an accelerated one. That was certainly an unexpected blessing.

The whole story is much more complicated than I have explained here, But that's what I've got to share at this point in time.

Have you had any surprises in your family history?