My Genealogical Christmas

Last night I was watching my new favorite TV show Who Do You Think You Are? sponsored by Ancestry.com which jolted my memory that I never told you about our genealogical Christmas. I meant to, but new stuff kept popping up and I forgot about it, so here goes, better late than never.

From the time she was a teenager my sister was convinced that some other nationality got tossed into the two ingredient mix that is my mother’s pure Irish background and my father’s equally pure Portuguese one. It  revealed itself, she believed, on the top of her head.  My sister’s hair is so formidable, so frizzy, so large, that she has to wear it long with the sides pulled up or you’d never see her face. When we were kids I used to torment her by calling her little Dr. Zorba. (Okay, that dated me.) While I admit that no one else in the family comes close to sporting a head of hair of such magnificent proportions I never found it especially indicative of an unknown genetic code. But my sister couldn’t let it go – the subject of her hair popped up endlessly over the years. So now that DNA testing is possible she signed up with Family Tree DNA, which I just found out is the official sponsor of the DNA portion of Who Do You Think you Are? They sent her a kit with instructions for swabbing both sides of her mouth, re-packing the swabs in special vials, and returning them for analysis.

I knew she’d already done it, but I told her I thought she would be disappointed because we already have a document that one of our Portuguese relatives from Hawaii (my father grew up in Maui) obtained from the Mormon Church which keeps genealogical records on almost everybody even if they aren’t Mormon. Ours is pretty impressive and goes back to the 1600’s, showing a long line of Portuguese people with cool names, all from Funchal, the capital city of the Madeira Islands, a Portuguese archipelago situated in the north Atlantic Ocean. All of them appeared to be Roman Catholics, as was my father.

“I KNOW there’s something there,” my sister argued. “Just wait – you’ll see.”

It takes six weeks for the report to come, but it handily arrived  a few days before Christmas – all 26 pages of it which she printed out from the computer. Christmas morning she bounded in my front door bearing both the envelope with the pages and a grin that rivaled  the cat who swallowed the canary.

“I told you so!” she crowed, waving it at me. “You are NOT going to believe it either!”

Two seconds later everybody in the house congregated in the family room to hear the story. My mind raced, trying to imagine what it could be, but all I could think of was maybe some African influence due to the location of Africa and the trade routes.

“Our family was not originally Catholic,” she began. “We were Jewish – on both sides of the Portuguese line. Our father’s father’s family traces back to the Sephardic Jews and his mother’s side shows two branches of Ashkenazi Jews, both of which explain THIS.”  She grabbed a fistful of hair on both sides of her head and held it out as Exhibit A.

“During the Inquisition the Catholic Church was obliterating the Jews, so they either got out of Portugal, or assimilated to save their lives. It looks like ours assimilated and married Portuguese people and then over the generations became Catholics by choice.”

Wow --talk about a zinger! But before I could wrap my brain around that there was more. At the top of the analysis it breaks down the percentages of every nationality which shows up in the test. My sister, despite the hair and the fact that she’s a little darker than I am, showed up as mostly Irish with Portuguese coming in at second place. The Irish side showed no real surprises other than the fact that my Irish grandfather had a tiny bit of English (which would have come as an unwelcome surprise due to "the troubles" that caused the Irish great suffeirng).The real stunner was that there was a THIRD category. My sister is twelve per cent Bedouin!

I could barely absorb it all. My sister’s face is my face and we are both small (we clearly got our size from the Portuguese), but she is a tiny bit darker and of course has THE HAIR. Yet here’s the thing. When it came time to meet up with our faraway relatives I chose to go to Ireland -- though I think it was more a matter of Ireland calling me home -- while she went eagerly without hesitation twice to Hawaii. And yet her DNA favored the Irish. The analysis from Family Tree also comes with the names of people all over the world who share a large portion of your DNA. The one who matches her best is a 20 year old singer living in Britain whom we found on You-Tube. His face is her face too, only framed with a mop of blond curls. He has an Irish name, but not one I ever heard mentioned in our family. We looked up some more matches online and found lots of accomplished people, including several writers, (and one very handsome gigolo in Brazil), none of whom look like us, or share the same family names.

Initially I thought I was piggy-backing on her analysis and didn’t need to spend the money to get my own. But this is not so. My percentages could be different and the people I match with could be different as well because we all inherit different amounts of the same DNA. Eric is urging me to do the test and I’m thinking about it. Before all this started I really didn’t care, but for some reason I think maybe now I need to know. Everyone featured on Who Do You Think you Are? is moved to tears by what they learn on the show. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do think that in a subtle way I am changed by the discovery. But how? I don’t know that yet, but I find myself thinking about it a lot which is why I think I need to see my own results.

Last night before I went to bed I read a story on the internet about a federal judge from Montana forwarding a racist email to his friends about President Obama and thought immediately of my sister’s anyalsis. Sephardic Jews! Ashkenazi Jews! Twelve per cent Bedoin! Who knew? Could it be that maybe we’re less the human race and more the human family?

It’s sure beginning to look like it. Maybe it’s time to act like it too.