Genealogy for non-geniuses
An unboxing and review of Ancestry.com’s DNA kit and what my brother’s Malort face looks like. Whenever I bring up my mission to find my grandfather to my fellow genealogists, they always end up singing the praises of AncestryDNA. Their reason: the site lets you to link your Ancestry.com family tree Continue Reading
Get it? Because “mẹ” means mom in Vietnamese. Oh, c’mon. It’s a solid pun. After getting my results back from 23andMe, I knew that I had to get my mom’s results in as well. Not only would her results confirm my suspicions that my African heritage came from her Continue Reading
And it’s probably the first of many, so buckle up. There’s nothing quite like the humbling sensation of realizing that you’ve been wrong about something—or at least, realizing that you might be wrong about something. This is the current reality I’m facing as I’m realizing that I may have been going about my search Continue Reading
Philip Marlowe eat your heart out. Since getting my 23andMe results, I’ve been lucky enough to come into contact with several of my distant relatives. One of the relatives goes by the name of Heather Concholar. I connected with her after matching with her grandfather, Dan Concholar, discovering that he’s Continue Reading
Why you should boil up a pot of tea and talk to your grandma right now. After pouring over the near infinite amount of ancestry and genealogy blogs out there for tips on how to get a better picture of my family tree, I discovered one piece of advice repeated more Continue Reading
There’s a redemptive power in ancestry, and it’s part of the reason I’m doing all this. Dying is my greatest fear. This will be pretty damn ironic to those who know me and also know that I regularly do things that put me directly in harm’s way (eg running with the bulls, getting hit Continue Reading
At this point, I’m convinced everyone is my cousin. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I used to daydreamed about being related to someone famous or renowned when I was little. The last lineage of an ancient yet noble royal family, perhaps. Or maybe, the heir apparent to a Continue Reading
What I found out about myself after paying $200 for strangers to look at my spit. I felt a familiar buzzing in my pocket and pulled out my phone as surreptitiously as possible. I was at work and we were having the second department-wide meeting in a week, much to Continue Reading
*with apologies to Ira Glass For her birthday this year, I gave my mom a vial of my spit. Or rather, I gave her the genetic results of that spit. “It’s a DNA test, mom,” I announced to her over the phone. She was silent for a while, and even in Continue Reading