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Sep. 9th, 2022 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonbeam6612I spend so much time on OTHER peoples' ancestors and heritage, that I have no time for my own, and I'm not convinced I ever want to make the time (my ancestors were boring. Farmers, mostly). But I just realized that there is a reason for me feeling so - rootless. It's that my "roots" are all over the place. On my dad's side, we have French heretics (yay!), who, at some point in the 18th century came to Southern Germany but kept marrying and procreating within their own group for a few more generations - until about the early 1900s I think. On my mother's side we have a grandfather (mine, that is, her father) from Silesia (now: part of Poland) who came to, ummm, West Germany after the war to marry my grandmother (who appears to have been distincly and exclusively Germanic). I'm kind of surprised how accurate my myheritage DNA analysis was - 50% of my DNA is Western European (French, German), 20% Eastern European, and the rest, strangely, Scandinavian and Italian (of course. The good old Romans! They were everywhere!). I honestly could do without the Scandinavian part (this is one part of the world I'm really not in the least interested in), but I'll just accept it as part of my universally human DNA if that's ok!?!? So that analysis actually sounds somewhat accurate given my family history.
The 20% seem to be determined to make it to the front it seems. I guess you pick the parts of your history, even if subconsciously, that seem the most interesting. The 50% are the boring part, though the French heretics are kind of cool, and I used to be very proud of them. HoweverI feel NO (like, ZERO) draw or pull to anyhing "French" though. I don't even like the language, though I understand it. I WISH I was a francophile because that would make my life SO easy! But, nope.
I don't know why my grandfather's parents already lived in the small town in West Germany BEFORE the end of the war, given that they were distinctly Silesian (I remember their accent), but there is an explanation and I've heard it, I just keep forgetting it. But maybe they didn't and just moved there after the war ("moved" being a euphemism, but the idea of "German refugees" is absurd to me, because, in my opinion, if you're the attacker, you can't be a refugee).
Anyway, are we the sum of our genes? If yes, then, yeah, that explains everything.
The 20% seem to be determined to make it to the front it seems. I guess you pick the parts of your history, even if subconsciously, that seem the most interesting. The 50% are the boring part, though the French heretics are kind of cool, and I used to be very proud of them. HoweverI feel NO (like, ZERO) draw or pull to anyhing "French" though. I don't even like the language, though I understand it. I WISH I was a francophile because that would make my life SO easy! But, nope.
I don't know why my grandfather's parents already lived in the small town in West Germany BEFORE the end of the war, given that they were distinctly Silesian (I remember their accent), but there is an explanation and I've heard it, I just keep forgetting it. But maybe they didn't and just moved there after the war ("moved" being a euphemism, but the idea of "German refugees" is absurd to me, because, in my opinion, if you're the attacker, you can't be a refugee).
Anyway, are we the sum of our genes? If yes, then, yeah, that explains everything.
