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. Iam 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.
And this leads me to another weird twist in the story. Twenty-one years ago, when my wife, Linda and I went to City Hall to apply for our marriage license, the clerk gave us a handout with ten frequently asked questions for people thinking about getting married in Florida. Would you like to know what the number one question was? “Can I marry my cousin?” You can, and you know where this is leading. To cut to the meat of this, yes, my wife and I are related—9th cousins, twice removed. This, like the Great Gaetz scare, was through my birth-mother’s family tree. She and I are both from old Hamilton stock. We’re both Scots from way back in the 1600s. James Hamilton, the 1st Duke of Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Cambridge, a Knight of the Garter, and a Privy Counselor, and his wife, Mary Feilding, the Duchess Of Hamilton, spawned the two of us. Thank God we were married in Florida where all of this is legal!
One more thing, since I was already mostly lost down that Hobbit hole, I figured I’d dig a little deeper. The late 1500s was as far back as I had been able to trace my own biological family, but I reckoned the peerage of a noble must surely go back further than the 1600s. And I was right. I was able to trace it, through one line or another, all the way back to the Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland, then even further back to Noah and his big boat, and, finally, to Adam himself. The very first man. So the research for my family tree is done. And now I should be able to get back to writing. Well, almost. Remember where this whole crazy thing started? With the Hobbit, Sam Gamgee? Well, way back in the year, 0140 CE, Sean Astin and I, or, Frodo and I, (it’s my story) have a distant great-grandfather with the unlikely name of Orc and I can’t help but wonder how all the good Hobbits of the Shire would have felt about that?
A native of the Sunshine State, Michael G. O’Connell has always been a storyteller. With more than 35 years as a creative director and illustrator, he now spends much of his time dedicated to writing and research. As a genealogist, he’s like a dog with a bone refusing to settle when hitting the proverbial brick wall, as evidenced by his tracing one branch of his family back to Adam and Eve. He believes it is through the understanding of our past that allows us to create a better future. He’s currently working on a southern Gothic novel and an illustrated middle-grade horror. Find him on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter.