I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. There have been many reasons personified over the years, but it comes down to two people – my parents and their choices.
See, my dad grew up in an abusive home. He became a product of that environment and chose not to change. I know limited amounts of information about his family due to us having no involvement with them and vice versa. I can only remember a handful of times I met my paternal grandmother, Helen.
My mom, was adopted. The story of her birth parents has changed over the years and then add that my Uncle and other friends of the family had other stories or versions, I never have known the true story. Sometimes it’s easier to be drawn in by the fiction, but there are times in life you want to know the answers and to put the puzzle together.
Answers sometimes come in small doses. Sometimes answers never come and sometimes answers come that we just don’t want to hear. But, I am ready to hear the answers. My son, Pierce, age 11, is asking questions I can’t answer. Doctors ask questions, I can’t answer. So the time is now to start unpacking that box and to slowly get the answers.
Let me tell you though, this process of unpacking that box, it is scary. First, asking for answers has gotten me no where. I tried that avenue and that is how the stories got wild and tangled, and lies were told that make me question whether to trust certain individuals at all. But over the years, some stories come together, and there is enough curiosity that I want to follow the path and see where it leads. The dark places don’t care me as much as seeing what the light might bring.
So, I started where I knew answers might come. I looked online and researched and built some of my family tree on Ancestry.com. And then, like most people, I put it to the side for a couple of months {or years}. Last week, I took the next step, because unraveling my mom’s side would not be easy ~ and I can either be part Asian, Ethiopian, or part monkey for all I know. None of those will likely be true, but the unraveling needed to begin somewhere and it might as well start with a DNA kit. After discussing this for the last 18+ years with my husband, we both agreed this would be a next step in one, answering my questions and two, answering the questions of our 11 year old son. I hope he won’t be upset that we are not part monkey and that our Siamese cat is not his real brother.
I ordered my DNA kit through Ancestry.com after researching it and other kits for a while. I chose this kit because it can link you to family members, and being that both sides lack this current connection for the reasons listed above and others that I won’t bring to the light just yet. Link to Kit This link will give you 10% off and will give me $10 on Amazon, that I will use to likely buy books because I like to read {thank you for investing in me and for helping me continue my debt free journey}. I also ordered a kit for my husband because the stories on his side are wild at some points, and because he has been told he has American Indian in his blood line {his great grandmother was 100% supposedly}, so we have been curious and so has Pierce. We have laughed really hard about what if the answer came back and it wasn’t so exotic and if his heritage came out differently, so here’s to hoping this is the side where the monkey comes in.
The description of the kit by Ancestry is “AncestryDNA is a new DNA testing service that utilizes some of the latest autosomal testing technology to revolutionize the way you discover your family history. This service combines advanced DNA science with the world’s largest online family history resource to predict your genetic ethnicity and help you find new family connections. It maps ethnicity going back multiple generations and provides insight into such possibilities as: what region of Europe are my ancestors from, or am I likely to have East Asian heritage? AncestryDNA can also help identify relationships with unknown relatives through a dynamic list of possible DNA member matches.”
The test itself with basic shipping is $108.95. For answers that have plagued us both, it seemed like it was a good investment. There is a discount for ordering multiple tests, and again, using the link above gives you an additional discount and gives me $$ for Amazon which also helps in my debt free journey {another story for another day}.
I’ll be posting more about the test and the results when we get them back in a few weeks, but I wanted to share this latest development because it’s a new adventure for our family in finding answers we wish we had.
