I love genealogy and family stories. There’s something amazing to me about how traits and characteristics get carried down, generation after generation, and in ties we have to the past. I look like my mother, think like my father and am built like my paternal grandmother.
This summer I took part in a DNA test from 23&me, partly out of curiosity, and party to fill in some gaps in my knowledge of my heritage. My mom was adopted at birth, and while we found out some things about her family of origin, I still have a lot of questions – especially health related. The test gave me the DNA results as percentages, and it confirmed my known heritage – Icelandic on my mother’s side, Scottish/English/German/Danish on my father’s side – with a small surprising dash of Norwegian and Irish in there, too. (Bottom line: I am very, very, very Northern European.)
I think there is something that doesn’t show up on genetic tests, though; some indefinable connection that links us in ways we can’t explain. It’s the love of reading (even favorite genres), or the way we curl up in a chair to relax. It’s the words we choose, the flavors we seek, the things that strike us as funny.
When I was about 22, I was standing in my Grandma Montgomery’s living room, talking to her about something so completely unimportant that I can’t recall, when suddenly she gave a visible start. I immediately got concerned, and asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
My grandma just stared at me and blinked for a moment, then said, “You just reminded me so strongly of my sister Louise – for a moment, it was like she was standing here, talking to me!”
We tried to pinpoint what it was, exactly, but there was just something unaccountable in the way I was expressing myself, or a facial expression, or some mannerism – or some combination of those things – that somehow felt like Louise was talking.
Now, my grandma’s sister died of tuberculosis a good five years before my dad was even born. There was no mannerism that he observed, that I then observed from him, for this to be learned behavior. It had to be deeper than that — nature.
My grandma went on to tell me that I had almost had “Louise” as a middle name. The name was a family name on both sides – my paternal grandparents each had a sister named Louise, and it was my maternal great-grandmother’s name. It seemed like a shoo-in, until my mom suddenly asked Grandma Montgomery what her middle name was. Grandma told her, “Eileen,” and my parents liked it with my first name, so that became my full name.
Small aside: For a while my name was going to be “Michelle,” probably because of the Beatles’ song — but then at the last minute my dad suggested “Juliana.” We teasingly say it was the name of an old girlfriend of his, but the truth is it was someone he met through work, and he liked the name…at least, that’s his story, and he’s sticking with it.
Years later, my mother went in search of her birth family. She found out that she was the eighth of nine children born to immigrants from Iceland, and that both she and the ninth child were adopted out due to economic hardship. The Edvalds family lived in Seattle and my mother’s adoptive parents – my grandparents – lived in Anchorage, which in 1947 was still a territory.
Many, many years later, we discovered that one of the oldest Edvalds siblings, a daughter named Lorraine, also lived in Anchorage in the late 1940s and early 1950s, so it is very probable that she came across my mother, her sister, while out and about. This was not an open adoption, so neither Lorraine nor my grandparents knew about each other.
Oh, and another fun and strange connection? It also turns out that my mother’s birth mother’s first name was “Elin,” which is pronounced the same as “Eileen.” No matter what they had chosen, I was going to be a connection to both sides of the family.
