Uncle God

While digging about on Ancestry.com, the genealogical website which accesses millions of records in a flash, I have found that I have membership in several families. While revelations can be misconstrued or mislabeled, it pleases me to think that my mother was related to history in terms and names found in books. My father treated her as though he had rescued a mouse who had been run over by his bicycle, and that would pitifully limp about while he shook the shoebox and yelled at it to get better.

She thought she was nothing.  A mistake.  From the age of two, when I understood not so much who he was, but had decided that this angry man who came home around dinner time should find someplace else to go, find another family to bother as if any other group of people would welcome an unpredictable knot of problems into their midst.  Oh sure, they might say, come on in, we don't have enough frustration and demeaning remarks, there should be more.  Would you like to throw a plate? Nooo, you're not really drunk or volatile; we understand. Have another beer, what about a sandwich?  No, it's not a plate of hot food. Whoa! You missed that time; here, try for the wall.  Every freaking day.

I have little access to records of his parentage, and it would be helpful if I knew the languages of his immigrant family who didn't seem to know what to do with him, either.  Most of them were quiet, gentle, humorous people who seemed to have landed from an entirely different planet based on food, where candy was kept in cedar chests, there were always hard anise cookies, and they were so glad to see you, a parade was announced for the neighborhood.  Daj buzie.  Except for the fact that the neighbors remembered my father, and would look at us kids and Mom with pathos bordering on panic as if they wanted to say, run, run for your lives!  

So, digging through Mom's lines, according to Ancestry, has supplied a number of surprises that arrive like pop-up book pages on a flat screen.  First of all, there is very little if any German, the family takes a turn into France where generations did things like bake for Napoleon's army, or maybe burn villages.  Her family came from the Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Finland, and Norway, places I had not heard that were connected to us, with names that seemed mythical as if her fairy godmother tinked her in the head with a sparkler and said, Look where you came from.

The Folgers who started the coffee business, Hamilton Fish, a Secretary of State; Ben Franklin, Henry the VIII, the Plantagenets, Mayflower Pilgrims, the colonist Robert Hunter, and the King of Castile were behind Dorothy Mae.  This was getting fantastic to me, that world history was entwined through my grandmother, who believed in the curative powers of cabbage and wieners.

I am still in the process of finding relatives and bloodlines, yet have started questioning the validity of Ancestry.  Now, this is how it works: they present the records, you are the one to match dates and names and boy howdy, you can tell when a handwritten record was deciphered into various dates by guessing what shape that number was supposed to be.  Fives become sixes, sevens look like ones, so as far as dates go, pick the one that makes sense and aligns with the family having children. People appear after their parents were beyond child-bearing years, or as replacements named after an earlier sibling who died.  It gives me a headache, and after an hour of who did what to who, the whole thing gets tangled into a ball of worms.

Clarity is key, yet as you and I know, clarity is as tangible and real as a blue sky; once humans open their mouths or write down a record, it becomes fabulous and suited to the purveyor's background; frogs and toads jumping out of people's throats makes more sense.  So, here I am delving amid the Tewdyrw Welsh, imagining everyone speaking like Richard Burton and wearing doublets.  Back, back, another set of parents, another set of parents, it's the 700's, another set of parents, keep going, how the heck do they know who was who; now it's the 300's and a Roman-sounding name pops up.  Tacticus Tegid of Britain.  Well, let's follow Tacticus and see where he came from; already his name had stood out among the dd's and y's that Welsh names are rife with, but now all the vowels are floating off as if those people had one typewriter with 18 broken keys.    

Gwyrddofen Ap Amwerydd is my 58th great grandfather from the year 79 A.D.,
and I wonder how the heck they know that for weren't things written rarely, on rocks?  I hear a ka-ching as Ancestry takes my $20 for the month and gleefully spins a cache of pingpong balls with vowel-less names taken from Neolithicity and You to toss at my curiosity.  But I am going to get my twenty bucks worth of research for the month and plug onward.

About 70 A.D., things get magical, as if the Lucky Charms leprechaun had jumped off the box of cereal and granted me three wishes plus a pot of gold doubloons.  By this time, I am guessing I am talking to sheep or a smart turnip. But a name turns up with a "Ben" in the middle, Avallach Ben Llud, meaning the son of Llud; now, getting ready for a Jewish wedding as our family is, I have learned a lot about Judaism and the significance of names.  Avallach is the son of Beli Llud Mawr, King of the Britons, who had married Anna of Arimathea; they had met in Rome, and Beli invited the Roman Christians to come visit Britain. Anna, accordingly, is the daughter of Joseph Ben Matthat of Arimathea by his first wife, his brother's widow Escha.  

Her sister is Mary the Blessed Mother.  She's my 66th great aunt.  Jesus is my first cousin, 67 times removed.  What really stirred my soup is that clicking on Mary's family members says, in print, that Heavenly God the Father was one of her husbands and that He is my 66th great grand uncle.   Birth, Omnipresent; Death, Omnipresent.

It must be remembered that Ancestry is Christian-based, that the Mormons believe that your family life is eternal, and part of their faith is to help everyone find out where they came from.  So listing God, (on the site it's GOD, like he's yelling at you), seems like valid fact.  If they had listed dust from the Alpha Centauri system as a far-off grandparent, I would be no less surprised.  I will tell you now that I am not Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist; there is someone out there, that I believe, and I guess the closest thing you could say is that I'm agnostic.  Having God for an uncle makes me uncomfortable, like there should be Old Testament carvings above my door to keep the Angel of Death satisfied that no Egyptians are within.

I was steeped, fermented, aged, and packed in the styrofoam of Catholicism which keeps people isolated and away from other religions.  After going to my friend's Episcopalian choir practice, my father made me go to confession, where the priest asked if I learned anything, if I did, to forget about it, and not to do it again.  Jews were a historical Biblical tribe that followed Moses through the desert for forty years; picture my shock when finding out the kid I sat next to in homeroom was Elias Bernstein, a Jew. A real Jew that wasn't mummified or wearing breastplates; he was more concerned with his scores in the school's Golf Club.  Wow, I thought as I brushed by him, I touched a real Jew.

Now the scheme is about finding the validity of this genealogical adventure; yes, these were real people, yes they had families.  Jesus is listed as having a wife and children.  Why not?  These families had descendants, which must be in the billions, but if you have had similar results, please let me know.  It is just too weird, as if a dog had showed up at my door with a human leg in it's mouth.

But the clincher is this: my religious fanatic father, who made Mr. T's necklaces seem paltry compared with all the medals, scapulars, and rosaries that he wore around his own neck; my father who made me go to confession when he found out I ate a hot dog on a Friday, this man who ranted about purity, the Blessed Mother, had everything blue because that was supposedly the color of her cloak, not because he was red/green colorblind; and railed about my Mom's lack of religious fervor, was actually living with a descendant of Mary, who I can guess wouldn't put up with his weekly breaking of household objects.  I still cannot stand anything blue; even if the cat throws up Super Supper, it's a better color than blue.  There are times when I look at the sky and am grateful for the rose and gold sunset. Turquoise, okay.  Close to purple, fine.  Royal blue makes my stomach ache.
 
My son has instructed me that under no circumstances am I to reveal a Jewish thread to his future father-in-law, who would dance on tables and crow joyously if Bri had a drop of Jew in him through me, his mother.  I went back farther, and the names Moses, Noah, Aaron, and Kohen blink back at me, as well I do at them.  Brian is wearing a yarmulke for the orthodox ceremony, I am trying to get him to wear a kilt with the Coburn plaid, which would be honoring my Mom, in a way.  Perfectly.

How can you manage everything that you are supposed to remember? It's suppertime in the Western Hemisphere, and I think a hot dog would be just enough, even though it's not Friday.  I'll remember things tomorrow, there's enough going on today.

You are the descendant of everything that has existed upon this spinning sphere, for it is said that all life generated from the dust of passing comets, meteorites, the clouds of ammonia and nitrogen that first resided in our first atmosphere. The planet formed when gases and dust from the explosion spun and congealed; that spinning increased as when a skater pulls in their arms and now we have night and day.  Water came; biology entered, crawled onto the rocks, and hissed at the other creatures emerging, probably fought over whose castle was whose, and became fanged.  Perhaps this has gone on for epochs, the tides rising and falling still older than anything.

Be kind, be nice.  That's all.  It's the best I can remember to do, I am not getting lariated into anyone's beliefs, nor tragic malarkey regarding stepping on cracks, breaking your mother's back and thus ending up in hell.  If it works for you, fine; as long as it keeps you on a balance beam of self-awareness and of the impact it may have on others different than you.  There will be surprises along the way, just do the best you can.

Sleep well, the summer air is warm but not intolerable, making for a memory of people taking blankets up on flat roof or outside in the grass to sleep.  The sky is melting into the symphony of colors presented at the end of each clear day, beginning with yellow golds reflected upon the downtown skyline.  Pick up a book and read, write a note for a future friend; piece together puzzles that tell you who you are; then let it go, a sylph caught on a breath of evening.  It's a story that floats through layers of time, whose stratification dissolves when you turn the pages of your life.  Good night.