My Heritage & Genealogy

As a species that's been around for a couple million years in various editions, it's always amazed me that we have pretty much no knowledge whatsoever of where we come from. I mean, sure, we know we started out as a species of high order primates somewhere in Africa. We know that about a million years ago we got the present body-shape and subsequently developed the questionable intelligence and technology by which we live today. But we know very little more than the past two thousand years of our sense of culture. Language we know about back maybe ten thousand years. Religion, well, that's iffy, but I'd guess we know about it something like one or two millennia. Either way, we don't know jack about our distant — and by distant I mean back more than five hundred years — progenitors.
     Some parts of my families' lines go back that far, to the early 1500s, in Europe. The ones we know about that far back are members of the Italo-Celtic tribes that entered Europe more than two thousand years ago. Others with that much background are members of the Germano-Slavic tribes that entered Europe after the glaciers in north European mountains had melted back enough to reveal nominally arable land. My Mediterranean forebears are not so lucky, even given that their heritage as recorded lives includes free-range Roman citizens (and probably no-so free-range Roman slaves) and other ancient folks of that part of the world.
     All-told, however, I guess I'm lucky. I have family records that Mom collected when she was shooting for a membership in the DAR. I have a copy of the family history that Dad's maternal grandfather started at the beginning of the 20th Century. And I've scraps of info here and there of family myths and rumors, a hadith of sorts with questionable isnads.
     Basically it works like this: Dad's mother, Helga Bull, was the daughter of Nils Rosing Bull, who collected his family line into the book Slekten Bull fra Trøndelag, a praktverk reaching back to around 1510. The first guy to carry the surname Bull was Jens Andersen Bull. His father, Anders Bull, is purported to have come from Rostock in Germany around 1490. A fair stretch.
     Dad's father, Thomas Wilfred Young, came from Canada. He and Helga met at a TB sanitorium in Chicago. They were married in St. Joe, Michigan. Dad was born in 1911 and ended up spending his early childhood in Norway.
     Helga died at her own hand in 1922, when Dad and his brother were still children. Thomas died in the 1930s at a hospital somewhere out west. Dad never said much about his father, since he felt that Helga's death was prompted by his father's alcoholism.
     As you might guess, what I know of my father's lineage is lopsided. I know much, much more about his mother's family than I do about his father's. The name Young shows up all over Canada, as it does around the world, each time hinting at a wider or more elevated heritage.
     My mother's family includes two Irish lines. One was the Sullivans, who arrived in this country before the Revolution, and who served in the revolutionist cause. The other group, the Dimonds of Galway Bay, Ireland, came to this country in the 19th Century.
     One of Dimonds, John Dimond, was the representative of the new Alaska Territory to the US Congress. The Schreibers, Mom's father's family, also came to the America in the 1800s. As you might guess, the entire map of Mom's genealogy is twisted and complicated.
     Basically, Mom's mother was May Dimond, daughter of John Dimond. Mom's father was Henry Schreiber. Both May and Henry were born in the 1800s and died in the middle of the 20th Century. They are buried in a Kersey, Pennsylvania churchyard with many of their ancesters.
     Mom and Dad met in the 1940s, after Dad had survived service in the 614th Army Ordnance Company in the Solomon islands in WW II. They moved to Amarillo, Texas, where I and my sister were born in 1946.
     Out of all of this comes one simple thought, a metaphor borrowed from a book by René Milan called The Undying Race.
     I am, like you the reader, a simple copy of a long-ago constructed consciousness that, unlike some misinterpretation of Darwin, has only one purpose: to keep the DNA around. While we feel that we are special as a species, we are no different from the dinosaurs or the squishy wigglies that inhabited the Burgess Shale. We're just high-maintenance primates. No special mission, no special destiny awaits me. All of us are here today because, at some distant point in time never to be known or understood, someone or something avoided being lunch.
     I'm just like you.
     As you are, I once was; as I am, you will be.