A friend gave the scrapblog editor the above
National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project kit for Christmas. You scrape a swab of DNA from your cheek and mail it in to the researchers, who add you to their DNA map and let you know where your forebears were more than 1,000 years ago.
That's pretty cool. The scrapblog editor will share the results, just for fun.
However, despite her obsession with our Sprickiness, the scrapblog editor isn't very interested in conventional genealogy, and lately has found herself explaining that to e-mailers who've Googled their way to the scrapblog and written in hopes that their Arkansas or Connecticut or Iowa Spricks are our Spricks.
Here are the two reasons why she's not a genealogist in the traditional sense:
1) Our family includes many adopted cousins whom we never think of as anything but our family. (Adopted cousins are in some ways luckier than bio ones -- they don't carry that dreadful gene for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for instance, or the one for giant eyebrows.)
2) Genealogy doesn't take you to any one place in the past, but to countless places. For example, consider this: You have two bio parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents, 64 great-great-great-great grandparents, 128 great-great-great-great-great grandparents, and so on, doubling every generation. By the time you get to your great X 15 grandparents in the 1500s, you have tens of thousands of direct forebears!
Genealogists usually follow just one thread in that huge group (DNA tests do the same; they trace males back a
long one male line, females back along one female line).
What
really interests us about family are these things:
1) Stories: You all have them. Sometimes the old photos we post tell a story, or accompany one. Personal stories are always interwoven with human history. For instance, World War II becomes much more interesting when you picture our own Ed stumbling onto Omaha Beach or through the Hurtgen Forest. An old building in Wabasha County is more intriguing when we know Grandpa Claus Sprick built it. 9/11 will shape the young cousins whose world it changed in the same way that Pearl Harbor transformed the fates of Alverna, Anna, Marion and their contemporaries. Current events in China are all the more interesting because they brought little cousin Izzbee into our family. And so on and so on.
2) Character: The strength of any family is not in numbers or names, but in the character of its best and most beloved members, bio or adopted. You'll notice that we focus a lot in stories and photos on those whose character we especially admire -- Anna, Joe and Mavis, for instance. We look up to them not just because they're our elders, but because they have taught us so much, and are so worthy of love and honor.
There you have the scrapblog editor's late-night riff on genealogy. Still, she'll let you know if the DNA project finds that bio-Spricks are descended from the marauding hordes of central Asia or the brutal Germanic tribes that made the Dark Ages so very, very special.
Some of these people share genes, but it doesn't matter. They're all very different, though they live in the same period in human history. And yet, they are cousins for life. They won't ever need those nametags to tell who is whom.
A friend gave the scrapblog editor the above National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project kit for Christmas. You scrape a swab of DNA from your cheek and mail it in to the researchers, who add you to their DNA map and let you know where your forebears were more than 1,000 years ago.
That's pretty cool. The scrapblog editor will share the results, just for fun.
However, despite her obsession with our Sprickiness, the scrapblog editor isn't very interested in conventional genealogy, and lately has found herself explaining that to e-mailers who've Googled their way to the scrapblog and written in hopes that their Arkansas or Connecticut or Iowa Spricks are our Spricks.
Here are the two reasons why she's not a genealogist in the traditional sense:
1) Our family includes many adopted cousins whom we never think of as anything but our family. (Adopted cousins are in some ways luckier than bio ones -- they don't carry that dreadful gene for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for instance, or the one for giant eyebrows.)
2) Genealogy doesn't take you to any one place in the past, but to countless places. For example, consider this: You have two bio parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents, 64 great-great-great-great grandparents, 128 great-great-great-great-great grandparents, and so on, doubling every generation. By the time you get to your great X 15 grandparents in the 1500s, you have tens of thousands of direct forebears!
Genealogists usually follow just one thread in that huge group (DNA tests do the same; they trace males back a
long one male line, females back along one female line).
What really interests us about family are these things:
1) Stories: You all have them. Sometimes the old photos we post tell a story, or accompany one. Personal stories are always interwoven with human history. For instance, World War II becomes much more interesting when you picture our own Ed stumbling onto Omaha Beach or through the Hurtgen Forest. An old building in Wabasha County is more intriguing when we know Grandpa Claus Sprick built it. 9/11 will shape the young cousins whose world it changed in the same way that Pearl Harbor transformed the fates of Alverna, Anna, Marion and their contemporaries. Current events in China are all the more interesting because they brought little cousin Izzbee into our family. And so on and so on.
2) Character: The strength of any family is not in numbers or names, but in the character of its best and most beloved members, bio or adopted. You'll notice that we focus a lot in stories and photos on those whose character we especially admire -- Anna, Joe and Mavis, for instance. We look up to them not just because they're our elders, but because they have taught us so much, and are so worthy of love and honor.
There you have the scrapblog editor's late-night riff on genealogy. Still, she'll let you know if the DNA project finds that bio-Spricks are descended from the marauding hordes of central Asia or the brutal Germanic tribes that made the Dark Ages so very, very special.
Some of these people share genes, but it doesn't matter. They're all very different, though they live in the same period in human history. And yet, they are cousins for life. They won't ever need those nametags to tell who is whom.
1 comment:
re this posting: THIS IS MOST CERTAINLY TRUE.
excellent. you have said, in a nutshell, why i am not the least bit interested when my brother Tomny tries to trace our lineage back to queen elizabeth i and charlemagne.
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