Most people shudder at their family’s skeletons, those broken bones of past indiscretions they wished would disappear. But mine are so much my passion I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t have become an archeologist. Then again, memoirists like me are archeologists of a kind. We track down dead things, dig up remains, speculate on meaning, evolve theories. Where or when this mania started I can’t say. Only that as a child I never failed to exasperate my parents for asking too many questions. So I learned to listen and observe to find my answers. And when that wasn’t enough, use the stealth of thieves to root through drawers, cabinets and closets I had no business looking in whatsoever.
The family member who interested me most was Papa. My blue-blood mother had a pedigree she could trace back for centuries; but he had been a child with a Dickensian past. The little boy his foster mother never wanted enough to adopt. Born in Paris to a nameless woman who abandoned him at birth, the only thing he had besides an incomplete birth certificate was a Middle-Eastern sounding last name from a man he swore up and down wasn’t his father. I’m English, he’d say. My mother just snickered and called my father a liar. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He’s just saying that.
The freebooting child in me didn’t forget. Which is why, more than forty years later, I spit into a tube from an Ancestry DNA kit and waited eagerly for the results. The child had not succeeded in finding answers, but perhaps the adult could. The test results excited me—at first. There was British blood mixed with blood from Germanic Europe that explained Papa’s translucent white skin. There was Armenian blood, too; but that result mysteriously vanished when Ancestry recalibrated the results several years later. Skepticism creeped in. I didn’t doubt that Papa was English. But had the bias in the laboratory—perhaps because of my name—“created” incorrect data?
Skeptical as I was about the test, the genealogical database into which my results were entered did eventually yield a first-cousin match to an elderly man named Martin who lived in the West of England. I did not bother to contact him. Too often the other people I had contacted, the second and third cousin matches who answered my feverish queries could not help. Then the tables turned and an amateur genealogist and ex-priest who shared a connection to both me and Martin became the one to ply me with questions. Do you know Martin? Where are you on the family tree?
I had only my father’s strange, fragmented story to offer him in return. So he looked at the amount of shared DNA I had with Martin and concluded I was a half-first cousin, the child of a relative born out of wedlock. That wasn’t all. Because he had studied Martin’s family history, he was able to offer a theory about the parent who had given Papa his English bloodline. Papa’s English parent wasn’t a man. It was a woman named Ethel Maud, the sister of the man who became Martin’s father. Her name was unsettlingly ironic; naming me had been my mother’s business, not Papa’s.
Ethel’s story stuck with me. A spinster, she came from a respected West Country farming family. She kept house for an uncle who lived in Bristol, living there until both he—and eventually she—died. My imagination began spinning stories. Had this placid woman taken a lover in secret, perhaps—for whatever reason—not the taste of her family? One thing was for sure. If she was indeed Papa’s mother, she went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy, going to Paris to have the child, then abandoning it. Perhaps it was the very British need to keep up appearances that drove her. That and the fact that as a middle class woman of the 1920s, she had everything to lose from being a single mother.
Despite my DNA test skepticism, I decided to take a second test just to confirm there was no Armenian connection. I would not know who Papa’s father was; but perhaps I could lay that piece of the puzzle to rest. This one, by CRI Genetics, promised insights into a deeper past that went back thousands of years. I swabbed the inside of a cheek: three weeks later, I received confirmation of British, Northern and Southern European ancestry along with a huge surprise. Weaving in and out of Northern European and Tuscan Italian bloodlines was an Asian one stemming not from the Asia Minor of Armenia, but the Asia of the Far East. The line itself was split into others that came from Bengal, the Punjab, Southern China. And even Japan.
The romantic side of my imagination whether one of Papa’s relatives, perhaps someone on his still-unknown paternal side, was a gypsy. The Romani people originated in Northern India, mostly the Punjab region; their descendants live all over Europe and the world. But the Chinese connection? Before 1900, Asians (and Southeast Asians), came to Britain as servants or sailors, usually in service of the infamous East India Company. Those who stayed in Britain lived in London or big port cities like Liverpool; most lived in poverty or at best, working class. Perhaps a Britisher in Papa’s history had worked in India or China, perhaps for the East India Company or even as a colonial official; perhaps had a liaison with a woman there. And the child that resulted wound up in Britain, probably London. Whoever they were, these relatives, they were travelers. People on the move…just like Papa, a restless man who could never stay in one place for long.
Going back even further, to the 1600s, the test revealed another surprise: a Taino connection from Puerto Rico. CRI Genetics had found connections to Spain; so had the first version of Ancestry DNA. It was clear now that if the test was correct, my ancestors had been part of the Spanish Conquest…and that this Taino had more than likely been a woman. I had read enough history to know that this was how empire worked: kill the men or work them until they die. Enslave the women and turn them into concubines. It doesn’t matter which side, maternal or paternal, she came from. Only that she existed and that one or more of her children had followed their father to Europe.
With so many unknowns in my paternal ancestry (and a few on my mother’s side), I am tempted to further speculate that these people, these other ancestors, had no wish to be known, desiring instead to lose themselves in whitewash of Europeanness just to survive. One of the things I remember my father telling me over and over was how glad I should be for who I was. Which in his parlance meant white and middle class. But the curious child who didn’t obey her parents had already learned what was important to her and remains important to her still: knowing where her skeletons come from. And understanding them—loving them, even—rules be damned.