Ancestors and Relations

A sweet relation photo: Bruce's dad and Bruce's second cousin's dog on Christmas Day.

While riding the stationary cycle at the Y, watching 24-hour news stations on a muted flat screen TV, I've seen about a thousand ads for the two commercialized DNA companies, Ancestry.ca and 23andMe.ca. 

Succumbing to the pressure, I sent away for the 23andMe package. I filled the spit sample tube and dropped it in the mail more than six weeks ago and still have not received a report.

I am an impatient person. So a couple of weeks ago I also signed up for Ancestry.ca and have set about learning about my ancestors the old fashioned way, by searching for them in a networked database with millions of digitized records and the searches of others who have relations in common. 

Also a relation photo, less sweet. Kevan MacRow, my brother-in-law in mis-matched gear.

The results - in a matter of mere days - and thanks primarily to the work of three Ancestry genealogists who have generously made their searches public, are that I have records back to my great-great grandparents.

My father's great grandad came from the Isle of Mull in Scotland and died in Grey County, Ontario in 1913. The details of my mother's great grandmother are not so clear, but she was married to a man named K.J. Vader Schmidt in Alexandrow, Poland. My mother's grandmother was born in Zabianka, Poland and died in Dafoe, Saskatchewan, in 1938. My mother's mother, the youngest of nine children, was born in Alexandrow, Poland in 1892 and died in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1933.

I'm glad to have this dim glimpse of the people whose genes I share but who I will never know. 

What is overwhelming about the experience of poking around in the data bases is seeing how many people there are who are connected to me.

It is a fanciful notion that people have family "trees." I assume this trope originated from royalty - the legitimacy of the heirs being determined by their forebears. 

The rest of us belong in a unbounded but finite web of relatedness.  

But, there are dark parts in that web. My mother's father, for example, is a complete cypher. 

The August 24, 1942 Lethbridge Herald, reported on its back page the casualties at Dieppe. Among the wounded was my mother's older brother, Alfred Kurt Lohse. The list notes Alfred had a father, Bruno.

Other than that single record, there is nothing about Bruno Lohse anywhere, so you miss the irony of these two lines of type on the back page of the Lethbridge Herald: at the same time that Uncle Alfred was wounded in the line of duty protecting his country, his father Bruno was cooling his heels as a dangerous alien in an internment camp set up by that same country.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen