New here and fellow scotsman from SoCalifornia

[Father Bill]

Interesting, the stories and opinions we hear about who we are. I've heard my own geneology and ancestry explained in slightly different although generally consistent ways. Interesting indeed! Might I suggest that we are whom we most closely identify as?

I remember reading somewhere that consistently throughout history, just over 7% of any generation did not (and I would guess do not today) have the father they thought they had/ have, so tracing back over generations, that 7% would be magnified by many "misconceptions" (pun intended) so that few of us would actually know our true ancestry.

Some would say that you can straighten that out to some extent with DNA testing, but there is no way I would personally choose or recommend sharing our most personal identifiers with a commercial (and not always trustworthy) enterprise, and which might even in turn be demanded some day by hostile, intrusive authorities. One of those companies recently foundered financially and their records are now in posession of another corporation whose contractual and legal responsibility to those whose records they hold is deeply questionable. What of privacy then?

You might even find out things that you might not like, or relatives you might wish you never had. Would you really like to discover that you were the close direct descendant of a serial killer, crook, a politician or dictator whose views horrify you, or some piratical individual? Although I have heard of many happy discoveries of genetic families and am even related to one such sucessful discovery (in which I was not involved, merely informed after the fact), I've also heard of some that were tragic when people were put in contact and there were unanticipated historical factors that generated hate and anger or harassment.

As far as paper records go, my geneologist/ historian friend pointed out to me once that nobody kept careful records on peasants... and that I qualified as such, so small hope of a 'good' trace. Further, in my own case, any written records further than three previous generations were lost from racist arson in a building that had contained the written record for my direct paternal line. I don't even have oral tradition beyond that.

Here's the thing though: my parents are the ones who raised and nurtured me, who cared for and about me. The same should be said for generations past and I hope others here and elsewhere have that happy situation as well. That is the ancestry I cherish, and the one that I recommend. As a priest, I can even point to divine scriptural approval of that point of view.

So then, to each, their own. I acknowledge that in this forum there are many who do not share my viewpoint, and I utterly respect theirs. Personally, I cherish and recommend most, the recent history of loving and "interesting" relationships, and see it as the most likely to be soul-satisfying. These are the stories, geneology, and ancestry taught me at my mother's knee. I do cherish those and find them quite sufficent and satisfying for me, and they are what I share with my son and his children.