Norwegian Ancestry

I've always been a little bit obsessed with my genealogy. I'm not exactly sure why, but I imagine it has something to do with maybe not feeling at home with where I grew up. The general region as well as the actual physical house. I always knew that both my father and mother were of largely Irish ancestry, so to simplify things I thought of myself as typically Irish-American.

There was a problem with this though, in that I wasn't raised Catholic. Being on the East Coast, and having lived in Massachusetts for a couple of years, I realize that being Irish-American has all sorts of different connotations associated with it. Ironically, the most Irish-American person I knew was my stepfather's mother, who could trace all of her ancestry to the Emerald Isle. Her father spoke Gaelic, and she held a lot of the old Irish superstitions. Her father had actually grown up in the Five Points during the 1870s and 80s, so I'd heard about Paradise Square and the Old Brewery well before Scorsese's film. She was a window into a past which is as dead as she is now. Go raibh math agut.

My father's mother was of Finnish and Finnish-Swedish ancestry. She used to cure fish in her refrigerator bought from the Vietnamese markets in San Gabriel and serve it to me regularly. As a result I'm pretty sure I'm immune to any and all seafood-borne illnesses, and am usually able to eat all kinds of sushi that even seasoned purveyors of the dish are utterly horrifed by. Raw sea urchin, no problem. I've mentioned our linguistic adventures together in an earlier post. She hated Russians and used to put cardamom in desserts. I'm super-white but her influence is about as ethnic as I get. She's dead now too, and has been for many years.

I've found out over the years, from talking to relatives and doing my own research that I have ancestors who were born in and had relatives who came from the following places:

-England
-Ireland
-Scotland
-Wales
-Netherlands
-Sweden
-Finland
-Denmark
-Germany

Basically places where Celts and Germans (in the broad sense-- Germanic, Teutonic, Norse, whatever) live. Finns can claim some uniqueness because they speak a non-related language, but all the recent DNA analyses that have come out show that Finns and Swedes are bascially genetically indecipherable from one another.

Ancestry is a weird thing. If you go back to your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, the generation likely born around the middle of the 18h century, contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson let's say, you'll find that you have 128 of them. It's hard to wrap your mind around a room full of 128 people. Ultimately, how much can you have inherited from any one of them?

All this investigating has also led me to wonder, what does it really mean to have Irish or Dutch ancestry? My mother's father was born in Germany but he wasn't ethincally German at all. His mother was Danish and his father was Dutch. I'm sure if you go back far enough none of them were from Denmark or the Netherlands either. Ultimately, all of our ancestors were from Africa. It's probably just as valid to say that I'm of 100% australopithecus afarensis ancestry as it is to say that I'm 3/8ths Irish, etc.

The one country in that corner of Northwestern Europe that was always missing from my ethnic makeup was Norway. But recently I found someone who eventually passed their genetic information on to me, that could claim that nation as their homeland. Someone with the last name Sommerfeldt who was born around 1820. I still find it interesting, but I guess I'm realizing, the closer I look, the less it really means anything. Perhaps Lincoln said it best when he said "I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be." Yet somehow I can't help but think that finding out my great-grandmother was half Lapplander will help explain why I hate getting up early and why I get nervous around horses. Go figure.