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Perhaps you’ve heard of AncestryDNA. It’s a program of that Ancestry.com where you spit into a vile, ship it off to the company and get emailed weeks later about results that have surprised some folks. (Like where a woman realized she has a different father, from a doctor looking to spread his seed.)
Mine came today. That my ethnicity estimate is 43 percent Irish, Scottish or Welch is not surprising – I’m a white person living in America. Twenty-seven percent from Europe West was a little more surprising.
But that wasn’t the most startling result.
Only 5 percent of my ethnicity is British.
This is a problem because I have grown up being told that from England came Edward Ashton, a person of legend at least among family. That’s because he was so noble to the Mormon faith to which he converted that he followed the church’s command. A command to not just relocate to America, but to pull a handcart like an animal otherwise would. (Mormon prophet Brigham Young opted against animals because money, according to “Stop the Press.”) They did so across harsh, rarely explored terrain along the American frontier to a land that was nothing but a desert.
This is especially a problem for me because I named my daughter after the family name. (For her, I still love it.)
If only one-twentieth of my DNA comes from Great Britain, how likely is this story?
This would especially be difficult for someone who still regards the blind faith of their pioneer ancestors to be a noble thing. The type, if not one of the actual people, who said “yes” in response to founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s question “Will you stand by me to the death?”, said precisely because he was headed to prison for violation of the First Amendment, according to “Stop the Press.”
Even as someone who doesn’t, it’s unfortunate that I was told this Ashton story as unquestionably true. After all, this is still where I unquestioningly thought I came from.
Family, those who I used to trust the most, told me this story. I even proudly wrote it for a magazine (perhaps not surprisingly, the Mormon church’s) and it was published.
In “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Rey feels terrible when she does not know what family she came from, particularly when getting no answers to the question when looking into a reflecting apparatus like the Mirror of Erised from “Harry Potter.”
Today, I feel similarly.
And, many at least who thought they had a certain pioneer background may have to ask the same question Rey did, ancestrally:
What family did you come from?
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