Sharing Ancestry

The Christmas season is now upon us but I am still ruminating in warm Thanksgiving holiday memories from the past few days. Two years ago I purchased an AncestryDNA test for each of my parents as their Christmas presents. I had been building their family trees on the Ancestry.com website and we were all enjoying the new discoveries I was uncovering about generations past. Even though each of my parents thought they already knew what the results of the DNA tests would say, we were keen to see what science could tell us. The test results would either confirm our assumptions or surprise us and we were intrigued by the ability to look further back in time through that the lens DNA allows.

The test kits arrived quickly and the instructions were so clear that we had completed both tests in less than 10 minutes. We set the completed test kits aside to take to the post office the next day. That night we all went to bed with the same anticipation that Clement Clarke Moore describes about St. Nick’s arrival on Christmas Eve. During the ensuing January weeks, which seemed to hold more excitement than in other years, my parents playfully speculated about the impending results and what they might learn about one another from them.

We felt that same anticipation and joy when we shared the test results with my Mother’s sister who stayed with us this past Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Sitting side-by-side on the living room couch, we showed her on Ancestry.com where we are from and surprised her with the same surprise we felt when we received the results. During the course of the next couple of hours, we took her on a tour of the research we had performed and told old and new family stories as we looked at our family trees.

And so I am still feeling grateful – grateful once again for this special gift, one that my family has enjoyed over and over for the past two years and, I believe, will continue to for many to come.