“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning no matter our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness. ” Alex Haley Roots
It all started with my Asian eyes. My mom told me that when I was a baby, people would stop her to comment on what a cute Korean baby she had adopted. I had dark black hair, almond shaped eyes and high fat cheeks. My twin sister Jill, however did not look Asian. She was kind of bald, with a thinner face and rounder eyes. I believe I inherited my eyes from my dad whose mother had emigrated from Russia. My grandmother Anna had the same shaped eyes. She called my sister “de onderer (not sure of the spelling), the Yiddish word for the other one, instead of calling her by name, because she did not resemble us. Weird, right?
Convinced I was part Asian, I decided a few years ago to check out my DNA with Ancestry.com. The result was as follows: I was 100% Eastern European Jewish. I guess Russia and China do share a border and it was possible that Grandma Anna and Grandpa Harry (who I never met) had lived near the border. That was the reason that I joined Ancestry, but am glad that I did. I have discovered some interesting second and third cousins along the way.
As Americans, we are obsessed with geneology. Twenty years into the creation of recreational DNA testing for Ancestry.com thirty- five million people have taken the test to match them to genetic relatives and predict where in the world their genes come from.
What are we looking for and what do we do with what we find? We look out of a curiosity and search out of a sense of rootlessness. Time and assimilation have stripped many families of their customs, languages and food of the past
“We look because we are born storytellers and want to know how our once upon a time fits into the narrative of our lives. We want to know if the past has guidance for us in our chaotic present lives” writes Libby Copeland in her book “The Lost Family, How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are”. The pandemic may be fueling even more of a desire to search as Ancestry reports a significant increase in subscribers since COVID began. We learned how important our family connections are during this time and we continue to search for meaning in our lives as never before.
In November, 2019, I wrote a blog entitled “Photographs and Memories” before Thanksgiving lamenting the loss of my sister and mom and dad and the fact that I was an “adult orphan” with few connections to my past. In the past three months, I reconnected with two of my cousins on my father’s side of the family and it has been a wonderful, meaningful experience. We are sharing memories and learning about each other and the ancestors who are no longer here. I am so happy to have these new connections to my family and I cherish our conversations and exchange of photographs.
“Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future.” Gail Lumet Buckley