my journey of discovery has given a few joys and ah hum moments so far, and its early days.. thankyou for the best ‘brief’ I’ve read on the topic… I’m going to heed your wisdom :)

My brother and I dug into some things a few years back and it was a pretty good experience on the whole. We thought we were 100% german on one side and 1/2 scotch, 1/2 irish on the other. None of which was true. We had some racial stuff uncovered also as my anglophile (somewhat racist) grandmother was actually 1/4 cherokee which was very interesting. Yes, despite all the family denial (well, more like zero acknowledgement on any level) that the family photo of her people who all looked like native americans is because they WERE. I thought it was amazing (you know those fan charts?) when you get back about 15 generations and you have about 30,000 ancestors on that level… Considering a lot of those people overlap and how few (relatively) people there were on earth at that time it really does drive home the point that we are all connected – it’s a big messy beautiful glob-o-humanity.

I take it you did the human genome/national geographic project thing? I forget what it’s called. My bro. bought the kit but lost the little capsule so we have yet to do it. That must have been pretty disconcerting at first that your ancestry was not exactly what you thought but it is what it is, right? It’s not like I can be sure my great grandfather xyz was really a biological relation just because he was married to ggrandmother xyz and it said so on paper. People fooled around back in the day, too. Anyway, definitely an interesting study.

I just wanted to tell you I love what you wrote. You sound like a very cool person. Thank you for sharing part of your experiences with us.