By Michael G. O’Connell I’m an artist, a writer, and a native Floridian. I’m also a second generation native to this country by adoption, but my birth family goes back to some of the first white people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I’ve uncovered some great stories from my bloodline, but this isn’t about that. As a writer, I like to spend my day writing, but that rarely happens. I am too easily distracted. It’s the research that takes me on another information-addled adventure. On one particular day, not too long ago, I had far too many windows open on my computer screen. Two hundred? Three? More? A normal day then. I also had an email from one of the genealogy companies with a pitch telling me Sam Gamgee and I were cousins. Actually, they were referring to Sean Astin, the actor who portrayed the long-suffering Hobbit friend of Frodo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And we are distantly related. So I was down another rabbit hole. Or Hobbit hole, since this was the case. And like Sam Gamgee, I found myself in a deep, dark wood of twisted family trees. My own Fanghorn Forest. I have been using FamilySearch recently because it’s free. Ancestry was getting far too expensive, and I was spending far too much time adding the minutia and discovering more and more distant relatives. The “free” part of FamilySearch is a little misleading. True, it doesn’t’t cost you any money, but it does cost you your immortal soul. Well, that’s what I’ve been told. You see, it is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And what I’ve heard is that after I’m dead, some of their church members might just baptize me as a Mormon, making me forever be one of theirs. Distractions. Let’s get back to my Hobbit Hole. At this point, it was more like a snipe hunt or, if I want to keep my nerd cred, the “search for ‘The One Ring to Rule Them All.’” This particular great hunt had me looking for distant relations. I was adopted and had recently found my biological family using my DNA, which is an entirely different story. While looking into my newly found biological family, I discovered my maternal great-grandmother was named Lela Magdelaine Gates. G-A-T-E-S. Her father was William Gaetz. G-A-E-T-Z. Yes, THAT name—the name we often hear in the news these days. Without getting political, I am not a fan. So, I had a dilemma. Should I look? I mean, how many people could have that name? With that spelling? I found Congressman’s family tree online and then found his grandfather on Family Search and, just like that, I had everything I needed to make the search. I could quickly confirm, one way or the other, something I dreaded. The only upside to a positive confirmation would be I could criticize him with a little more authority because we would be family. This had been chewing at the edges of my brain like a rat for months. And I had to know. I input the ID codes and then I clicked the button and in less than a second, I had an answer. The answer. I could breathe again. No relation. And that was going back at least 15 generations. Much more than that and we are all related in some way or another. Click on the image to read more.

By Ilene Alexander Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything. – Leslie Marmon Silko You likely know the 20 Questions game in which players ask yes/no questions to identify a particular person, place, animal, object, or concept one of the players has in mind. A game for passing time with family while travelling or among friends learning a bit more about each other’s lives and interests while just hanging out, this game focuses on discovering answers to trivial questions. An amusing pastime that evokes good feelings, it seldom leads to forming memorable insights about people. I have in mind a different set of 20 questions, the Do You Know Survey developed by Marshall Duke, Robin Fivush, and Sara Duke. Their questions cluster into two broad categories—family origins and histories and birth and family trait stories. Overall, these who, what, when, where, why queries focus on basics such as parents’ and grandparents’ growing up, meeting, and marrying stories; their recollections of good and bad experiences in school, work, life, and health across generations; and learning appreciatively about family members’ national, ethnic, cultural, and/or immigration backgrounds. The key factor is how the stories are transmitted—through consistent, undistracted conversations during which family members listen and engage with multiple perspective-taking stories over many years. These regular gatherings create opportunities for children to hear a family’s history, build emotional strength, foster resilience and well-being, as well as develop a sense of self-identity within the intergenerational narratives. The power of family storytelling lies in its ongoing, meaningful presence rather than in isolated moments of information sharing. Given the gift of oscillating stories—the “life has ups and downs” stories told overtime by multiple people—I believe I’ve navigated, dare I say enjoyed, my DNA discovery because my raising up families sparked curiosity to seek stories however family shaped itself. Now, let me tell you a bit about how I came to realize old and new stories as essential for sense-making of the new DNA-provided stories. Click on image to read more.

Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret. It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later. Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful. Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.” Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.” “I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father? Click on image to read more.

For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief. If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.