Member-only story
I come from a long line of colonizers.
Let’s just be real about this.
My dad and I did DNA tests earlier this summer.
I didn’t meet him until I was 23 years old (I wrote a story about that a few years ago), and I haven’t really had a lot of opportunity to get to know other members of his side of the family except via social media, so I was glad that he was willing to do it and maybe help me build out some of the more gray areas of my past.
Coinciding with this, I had a genealogy moment (sign #6 that you’re getting old is having genealogy moments). My dad’s ancestors were all Levantine/Mediterranean immigrants and apparently hadn’t documented too much past a few generations, but I was able to trace my mother’s ancestry back to the 1400s.
It’s not pretty, though it sounded like it at first, because so many of us are built for attraction to the royalty trope. In my family tree there are lots of sirs, lords and ladies, including Baroness Ursula Pole, my direct connection to the wildly dysfunctional Tudors and my 11th great-grandmother. But the only reason I know this is that landed gentry kept track of this stuff as one way keeping their wealth amongst themselves.
