Delving into family ancestry fit in well with other pandemic pursuits.
Staying at home meant spending a lot of time with my immediate family, sometimes sharing stories our parents and grandparents told, which led to Googling ancestry tracing sites.
You don’t have to break quarantine to research your DNA. A consumer genetic testing company mailed us everything we needed. The kits sent by the company included addressed, postage-paid mailers to return vials we were instructed to fill with saliva.
Okay, instead of handing vials nestled in their mailers over to our mail carrier, I did venture outside to drop them into a USPS box. Some days the only time I ‘ve left home in recent months was to jog a loop around the neighborhood for an hour. Taking the kits along on one morning’s run gave my daily exercise novel purpose.
In the spirit of the board games that my family has taken up in lockdown, before I dropped off the vials my husband and I got a bit competitive about who would be the first to fill a saliva vial. He won. My husband also usually beats me at our games, including one of our favorites, “Ticket to Ride.” The goal of “Ticket to Ride” is to claim the most railway routes. We have various versions of “Ticket to Ride” that let us dream of traveling across America, Europe, India and Japan. Ah, to travel again once we are all vaccinated against COVID.
I’ve found more time for books, not just board games, now that my commute from work involves only taking the stairs from the bedroom to my home office. Many of the writers who have helped get me through the pandemic tell stories of journeys.
Those writers who have expanded my horizons while I was trapped at home include Maaza Mengiste, who starts “The Shadow King” in Ethiopia in the 1890s and takes readers to Italy as well as Ethiopia, where the novel ends with the toppling of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. I’ve also read in recent months Robert Jones Jr.'s “The Prophets,” set for the most part in slavery-era America but reaching beyond the Middle Passage to West Africa. Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” took me on a journey similar to Jones’s - her characters traveled from pre-colonial Ghana to antebellum Alabama and back to Ghana’s shores in the 21st century. And then there was Zambian writer Namwali Serpell’s “The Old Drift.” Her sprawling novel has an endpaper with a family tree that starts in the 1800s with the births of characters such as Percy in England, Giovanna in Italy and N’gulube in what is now Zambia. Descendants of all these great-great-grandparents come together in Zambia in Serpell’s plot.
In some of the tidying up that we’ve found ourselves doing while homebound, I rummaged through my desk drawers and found in an old stationery box a letter that my grandmother wrote me in 1985. In the letter, the late mother of my late mother shared tales of family, history and geography.
My grandmother was writing in response to a letter I had written to her about how much I was enjoying “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the classic novel by Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston that was set in a small town in Florida. My grandmother wrote from her own small Florida town that she, too, was reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, had recommended to her as well as to me. My grandmother said the novel was “like a diary for me,” that made her mind take “a spin backwards, to some pleasant and unpleasant times.”
“My mother,” my grandmother wrote in her graceful looping script, “was a sweet person. She was smaller than I am and about the height of your mother. I look a lot like she did. Some times I look in the mirror and I can see it so much, now that she is gone. She was the mother of eight children. One, a boy, died in 1929. She never worked before my father died in ’44. Just stayed home, kept house and sent seven children to school clean. She and my father eloped when she was 14 in a little town called Carrolton, Alabama. That’s where her first child, a boy, was born. I was next. My sister that’s sick in Miami came next. Four more were born in Florida, three right here in Chattahoochee, one in rural Gadsen County outside of Quincy.”
My grandmother went on to tell me that her mother was born in Pickens County, Alabama on Christmas Day, 1900 and had one older brother and two older sisters. My great-grandmother died June 20, 1977.
“I still miss her very much even until today,” my grandmother wrote.
“I do not remember very much about my grandmother,” my own grandmother continued. “My mother said she was of Black Creek Indian descent. Her father was Indian and mother was Negro born right after slavery was abolished of a slave mother. Worked the cotton fields and never left the state.”
It was a gift to be able to share my grandmother’s letter with my daughter, who was fascinated and found the writing style engaging and fluid. My daughter realized that her love of reading and flair for writing was in her DNA.
According to the report from the genetics company that I was able to access online weeks after sending my vial, my daughter’s DNA also most likely includes a great-great grandparent who was from one of the ethnic groups native to what is now Nigeria and born between 1810 and 1870; another great-great grandparent who was French and German born between 1810 and 1870; and a great-great-great-great-grandparent who was Native American (the report does not specify any ethnic group or region) and born between 1690 and 1810.
The broad strokes provided by the genetics company aren’t specific enough for me to link the company’s information to the ancestors my grandmother described in her letter. That will take more focused genealogical sleuthing, including checking census records and contacting relatives who might be ahead of me in such research. Maybe that will be among my post-pandemic pursuits. Or perhaps I’ll just visit Nigeria, a country with a rich history and culture - and birthplace of so many great writers - that I’d wanted to visit even before my link to the region was revealed by genetic testing.