Ancestory and DNA

 

 

Like many people, I had my DNA done. There were almost no surprises. Mostly English and French. 

I knew that already.

I even knew most of the names of the people who settled and lived in North America prior to my own appearance on the planet.

I'd been to La Rochelle, France where my ancestor Michel Boudrot (the name evolved into Boudreau) sailed for a second time in 1640 after marrying in the same church where he was baptized.  I even imagined the scene of both ceremonies. There was a ship in the harbor, a replica of ones on which he might have sailed.

Little did he know some of his DNA would visit the site of his early life centuries later. Of course, he didn't know about DNA at all. He was probably more worried that his possessions would be on board, the roughness of the Atlantic between La Rochelle and Nova Scotia, how his bride would like the New World. He had no idea that he would become a general and the father of 11 who would multiply.

As for the English side, John Sargent fought in the American Revolution. I know nothing else. As a small child, I knew my great grandmother Medora, then bedridden, but my memory of her was formed by stories I was told. 

Hers is the last life story I knew and then only that her husband Charles Stockbridge left her with a teenage son and daughter to finish raising. I would love to know more about why he did what he did, how she felt, how she survived other than my grandmother having to leave school and go to work. There's no one left to ask.

Not just Medora, but I want to know was more about the lives of each of the people that led to me, but that is lost in the haze of history, unrecorded.

What the surprise was the one percent Norwegian. 

As a writer my imagination went wild. Two scenarios are the ones I  think of most.

1. A Viking on one of the raids in the 8-11th centuries, raped a woman, who started that bit of DNA that exists in my body.

2. A Viking on one of the raids in the 8-11th century seeing the rich land was tired of his days at sea, tired of pillaging, and he wanted to settle down and found a woman and stayed.

A third creeps in from time to time. I fell in Love with Scotland and Edinburgh. Maybe that's a bit of my DNA recognizing from whence it came planted there by a Viking.

When I went to Norway years ago, I was unaware of any Norwegian connection. I just knew that short me was in the land of the elbow. Obviously the height part of the DNA was lost in the centuries in between then and now.  

Hidden in my DNA are hundreds of stories of people I will never know. I suppose, those strands of DNA could be made into sagas, which I probably won't write. I will continue to imagine where the possibilities are endless.