A DNA Birthday Gift - Part One

A few years ago, I decided to check off something that had been on my To Do List for some time; research my family ancestry. So one weekend when I had nothing on my schedule (a rarity these days), I signed up with Ancestry.com. Of all the incredible information I found there, the most interesting was a ship manifest from 1866 that listed my great-great grandmother as a passenger, coming over to America from Germany when she was 15 years old. I literally spent the entire weekend on the couch, hunched over a laptop, clicking away and creating a family tree. But that was all on my mother’s side of the family. My father had been adopted in 1949 by my grandmother in Seattle. Years ago, he gave me his birth mother’s name and I've never forgotten it. I found her information and discovered that she was raised on a farm in Prairie Center, Walsh, North Dakota. According to a 1910 census, her parents had immigrated from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). That was about as far as I had gotten when life happens and you have to set the project aside.

Since then Ancestry.com has something called Ancestry DNA, so I jumped at the chance to dig even deeper into my family tree. (Disclaimer: I am not advertising for them in any way, it’s just what I have used.) I got the package in the mail just before the holidays and set it aside. I will admit I was a little nervous to open this door. They have both passed away since and now I want to explore my ancestry in a way he couldn’t. My dad never found his father so there is a whole part of history missing and hopefully this experience will give me a little more information.

It was my 31st birthday a few weeks ago and I had been wanting to do this for awhile now (and I'm not getting any younger). Plus, the last couple years I have been refusing to not do something just because it’s scary (well except of course skydiving and swimming with sharks - no thank you!). So I finally decided to rip off the band-aid (or open the package), spit in the tube and shipped that thing off!