Ello Guv'nor
This is an update to another story, Poor Historian.I don’t know much about my family history for various reasons (e.g., my father was adopted and we don’t know much about his birth family, all of my grandparents and my mother are gone, and the stories on my mother’s side are inconsistent from person to person), and so I bought a DNA test.
The big shock: I am white. Like, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious white.
Okay, JK, I was not surprised at my whiteness, but I was surprised to learn that the part of me that I always thought was there, actually was not. I grew up thinking that my mother was Italian. She used to make pots of tomato sauce that were filled with everything from pork chops to homemade meatballs. It would cook all day and everyone that we knew would come over for the feast. She also made the best eggplant parmesan; even people that hated eggplant would ask for her to make it. I was in love with my Italian side and in stereotypical white fashion, I proudly said that I was Irish Italian. The Irish was an assumption, I guess, from my father and his birth name. Thanks to ancestry dot com, I now know I was wrong.
I did some family tree research on the site and found a cousin that has done a lot of work already. I even scored some cool pictures! I also discovered where the Italian story started. My grandmother’s mother died when she was a baby and her aunt raised her as her own. The woman that I thought was my great grandmother was actually my great aunt and she was married to an Italian dude. So my bloodline is not Italian, as far as I can tell, but my family came from an Italian house in Brooklyn, New York. The great uncle/great grandfather was very Italian and his parents came from Italy in 1877. I imagine that my grandmother grew up in this house thinking that he was her father and only continued this story after learning the truth to keep things easy. Her real mother had passed away and the story is that her real father disappeared shortly after. The weird thing is that I can find the real father on the site and he married another woman with the same damn name and relocated to New Jersey? That mystery is something that I will dig into another day. Right now I have to research more about tea and crumpets.I also purchased DNA kits for my mother’s siblings and my father. We are still waiting on their results. I texted my aunt with my update and she said that my grandmother always used to joke that we had ties to the crown.I was secretly bummed that I wasn’t addicted to pasta for genetic reasons, but now I am super pumped to kick it with my long lost cousin, the Queen.