Those sending their saliva to ancestry.com and 23andMe might want to heed the advice Dr. Zaius gives to Charlton Heston as the stranded astronaut sets off to stumble upon his destiny in Planet of the Apes: “Don’t look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.”
Exhibit A: our friend Peter, descendant along the Quincy line in Massachusetts – you know, the folks who more or less invented New England. Peter took an early iteration of one of those DNA tests and was told, to his astonishment, that he was – according to Science! – significantly Norwegian.
Muttering the Yankee equivalent of “WTF,” Peter threw himself into a full-bore exploration of this putative heritage. As we live about 30 miles southwest of the first Norwegian settlement in America, he requested a tour of his new mecca: Kendall, New York. We warned him that the Norwegian influence on and presence in rural western New York is somewhere between negligible and invisible, but images of the homeland he’d never seen clouded his mind.
Germany and Italy were the other ingredients in my ethnic stew, but I forbore any Axis celebration
So we drove Peter down Norway Road and told him the story of the Sloopers: the first Norwegian settlers in America, 52 hardy souls who in 1825 traveled along the Erie Canal before disembarking in Holley and hiking the ten miles to Kendall. (A 53rd Slooper, Lars Larson Geilane, stayed behind in New York City to sell the sloop and then skated 290 miles along the frozen canal.) I thought I detected a tear escaping Peter’s eye as he read the weathered historic marker dedicated to the Sloopers in front of Kendall High School.
Further testing of Peter’s spit or blood or whatever watery fluids he produced revealed him to be a Quincy with nary a trace of Scandinavia coursing through his veins, but who wouldn’t like to be Norwegian for a day?
Exhibit B: my father-in-law, proudly Armenian, who after his boyhood in the diaspora community in Syria became an American citizen of Glendale, California, wherein resides the largest concentration of Armenians this side of Yerevan. My father-in-law, too, took a test, and it threw him for a triple loop: rather than affirming him as 100 percent Armenian, it asserted a prominent Basque strain in his makeup.
This seemed preposterous – and subsequent testing of his offspring has revealed their progenitor to have been fully Armenian. But that didn’t stop my wife and daughter from pursuing their parallel version of the ethnic fakery currently on display by the “Pretendians”– those mostly female claimants of a specious Amerindian heritage, à la Senator Elizabeth Warren and folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. I told wife and daughter that they were engaged in a Basquerade. But they rather enjoyed the cultural appropriation, and I did too.
As it happens, we three were in Boise, Idaho, while the Basque charade was going strong. Boise has the largest Basque population in America. There’s even a Basque block, complete with museum, market and a bar at which we ate croquetas and toasted those noble sheepherding people.
My newly Basque loved ones purchased bumper stickers boasting of their half-Basqueness and quarter-Basqueness while I searched in vain for a refrigerator magnet bearing an exclamation-point-studded logo of a Basque separatist group. Euskadi Askatuta, baby!
The Basquerade was fun while it lasted, but let’s face it: the Armenians have much better food. After rolling these balls of confusion I figured that I may as well spit on a piece of paper and send it off to the DNA boys. Alas, my report – or series of reports, as these were refined several times – revealed no hitherto unknown exoticisms, though an early version did credit me with being 1 percent Eastern European, which led a family member to delightedly dub me the Polack. I considered, but rejected, the opportunity to try duck blood soup.
Turns out that my mongrel heritage is plurality Irish, which I’d suspected. A genealogy-digging relative placed most of our Mick forebears as Catholics in Northern Ireland (Fermanagh), so I scared up a 1981 hunger-strike poster and taped it to my office wall. Given that Englishness ran a fairly close second in my bloodline, I figured that in all fairness I ought at least to down a compensatory black and tan. Germany and Italy were the other prominent ingredients in my ethnic stew, but I forbore any Axis celebration.
Our daughter and son-in-law recently had their dog Scooter’s slobber subjected to a canine DNA test administered by the cleverly titled company Embark. At last report Scooter was content being a mutt, as we all ought to be.
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