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DNA revisited
The company that handled my dna autosomal testing updated it’s program last month and my ancestral picture looks a bit different. I think it still mostly fits with what I know of my family history but I understand it changed a lot for many others.
There were two notable changes for me. One is actually really small because it now shows a trace of Native American origin. According to the information provided they included trace origins at the request of customers. Also, this still doesn’t make it definite I have any connections but it reopens the possibility of the family story of Cherokee heritage just a tiny bit. I think it would be kind of cool if that was the case…Although I also realise that any connections I have might have less than appealing history about them should I ever find out about it.
The slightly more useful information shows Shephardic origins of about 6%. I don’t know much about it but it’s related to Jewish heritage. Most of this connection seems related to the Iberian peninsula which is the most surprising part of it. Also odd was the way this part was considered greater than any Western European origins. But none of the matches that came up for me (1147 so far) show earliest ancestors there so maybe it’s not really what it seems. I can only assume that my German heritage is listed under Eastern Europe even though most of those ancestors came from the Black Forest area. I think some of the other Jewish heritage may come through my Polish origins.
I finally uploaded a GEDcom file of information compiled by my mother into my family tree on the website for the dna testing. It took a while to figure some of it out but I eventually got there. There were some mistakes along the way, some of which I was able to correct. Then there were deaths in the family that have occurred since that was done that need to be updated. I was able to get some of that corrected but I couldn’t find the death date for my grandmother. I know she died in late November 2011 but I am not sure of the exact date so I will have to query my mother on that. Or maybe I should look to see if I posted about it here.
Anyway, I was interested to see all the names in the history. Most of the family really goes back to England and Ireland, especially for my mother’s side. And on my dad’s side I noticed the migration of generations west from their initial immigration into Philadelphia in the 19th century. Seems they just drifted ever westward in Pennsylvania over the years and settled in the town where my father was born.
I need to check on some of the information with my mom though because my cousins did an extensive family history on my maternal grandmother’s family and only one sibling of that grandmother is actually listed on the family tree. I know my cousin covered all the sibilings and it was a big family…I think maybe twelve children and I think most or all survived childhood. There should be a hard copy of that somewhere in papers my dad has. I might ask him to scan them and send them to me. I assume he has them since it’s his family but maybe my mom has it instead since she was working on the family tree.
And one interesting coincidence came up too. I noted someone with the last name of Brezinski or something like that and in the next day I saw an article about Kelly Ann Conway being on tv on a show with someone with that last name. It’s not a name I would normally come across with any regularity and yet it was there within a day. That name goes back many generations so connections with that family would be quite distant but it was really funny that it happened.
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History
Seventeen days ago, Australians voted in a federal election. Normally we have a result the same day but this time neither major party had a majority and we had a hung parliament. So we’ve been playing the waiting game to see who would be head of the government. It was all hinged upon preference choices of a few non-major party members of parliament. There’s probably an easier way to phrase that but I can’t think of anything at this hour. After more than two weeks, the last three have finally made their choices and the Labor government will remain for the next three years. We breathed a huge sigh of relief at our house once we knew the result. While we aren’t too happy with the state of this government, it’s far preferable to the opposition. And because the government doesn’t have a majority, balance of power will fall to the Greens party. So it will be interesting to see how Australian politics fares over the next three years. This whole chapter of Australian politics should be seen as quite historic. This is also the first time a woman has been elected as prime minister. And it’s also the first time a known atheist has been elected prime minister.
On a more personal note of history, today was the anniversary of the end of my second pregnancy which ended with a fetal demise thirteen years ago. It’s interesting that I’ve been more aware this year than I’ve been for the past couple of years. I no longer feel a sense of loss for the child that might have been but I do have a strong memory of the feeling of going through the experience all those years ago.
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It started with my dream
I woke up from a dream a couple days ago and remembered very little of it. But in part of the dream I ended up in an old discount department store, Zayre, that was popular in my childhood. I haven’t thought of the store in many, many years so it’s strange it would appear in my dream. I’m not even sure that really was the store in my dream. But the sign on the store was like the old neon Zayre signs in the 60’s and 70’s. So maybe something about the sign on the store triggered my memory of the store’s existence. I couldn’t really remember when Zayre disappeared from the landscape of my life so I went searching online as one does. I found out all I wanted to know and more. (This is the first website I found. There are several photos of old Zayre stores in the middle of the page with signs as in my dream.)  I discovered heaps of websites dedicated to old chain stores, be they department stores or grocery stores. And on the blogrolls of some of the websites were links to other similarly nostalgic websites. I’ve found it quite fascinating taking this stroll into the past because I read about many other stores that I’d also just as easily forgotten.
For example, what I consdered the local Target where I grew up actually started out as a Richway. And I knew it as Richway far more years than as a Target so it’s kind of interesting that I didn’t think about the fact it had been Richway most of my growing up years. I’d even forgotten that Richway was a discount offshoot of Rich’s department store in Atlanta. And apparently that store has now been taken over by Macy’s if I remember what I read correctly. Then there is the Treasure Island department/grocery hypermarket where my family shopped when we lived in Georgia. I think I only ever went to the one store but I have fond memories of ice cream treats from the front of that store. I was fairly certain it had closed down at some point but I also learned that the original Home Depots were housed in old Treasure Island stores not far from the one where we shopped. That’s where I learned that Eckerd drugs no longer exists because apparently Treasury drugs, which was part of the Treasure Island/Treasury chain, either bought it out or vice versa. And CVS eventually bought out the entire conglomerate. This kind of clears up my curiosity that there only seemed to be two standalone drug store chains while I was in Texas. I have strong memories of the Eckerd’s chain through most of my life before moving to Australia. I still have a box of Christmas ornaments that my family bought there thirty-five years ago. It was a ncie set of ornaments although most have broken over the years.
There were many more tidbits of information I learned while trawling through various websites. I ran across one on dead malls which I had run across once before. On that previous  occasion I discovered that Carolina Circle Mall in Greensboro, NC had closed many years ago. It’s not so much I had any particular attachment to the mall but it was one of the shopping centers I used to visit during my college and early work years so it was truly weird to think it had gone. I eventually even found a link to a website dedicated to that old mall started by a teenager who is now probably about twenty years old.  I read about the old Eastland Mall in Charlotte, which was the local hangout during my teenage years. It closed just a few weeks ago after many years of decline. I must admit that left me feeling very sad since I spent a lot of time there during my teenage years. I was aware of the mall closing because of a fan page created for it on Facebook. Otherwise I might very well have learned of its demise from the dead malls website. And today I found a website dedicated to Charlotte (NC) eateries that are no longer around. That made me sad, too, because I recognised many of them. And I’d even eaten at some of them.
It’s made me rather sad for the loss of such a diverse range of retail outlets as once existed. I know change is a fact of life. But it really seems as though the limit has nearly been reached for the smaller and/or weaker fish being swallowed up by the big fish so I wonder what happens next in the overall picture.
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Moon walk
It dawned on me a few weeks ago that the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and the moon walk was coming up. I hadn’t really heard anything in the media mentioning it at the time so I’m not quite sure what triggered the thought. At the time my main thought was, “Wow!”
In the weeks since, I’ve thought about it more and noticed the media was drawing attention to it. On the 16th I was watching and reading about the launch of that mission. It became quite clear that while this was a momentous world event, it was also something of a milestone in my life. I was only four in 1969 and it’s quite possible this is my earliest memory now. I would be lying if I said I remember it clearly but I do remember the night. Our family, like many around the world, was in front of the television that night. We watched events as they took place on tv and we also went out into our backyard to look at the moon.
I think that is what stands out for me that night…looking at the moon and realising that there were humans from earth walking there. I do have a strong memory of the sense of wonder on that night. This was really the first major event of my life. Sure, there were plenty of major world events occurring in the late sixties. But this was the first that my four year old self was able to grasp in any way. Even to my 44 year old self, it’s pretty astounding.
My thoughts have wandered over the past few days to the continuing sense of wonder about the space program through my early years. At school, we would learn about NASA and its space program pretty much yearly right through my primary school years. I used to know quite a bit of detail about those early American spaceships. In the reading book I had one year was a speculative sort of story or article about a base on the moon. I think there were predictions of having some sort of settlement there by the turn of the century. There was a sort of romaticism about it for those of us growing up at the time. In our family, it was my younger brother who was especially enamored of all things related to space.
Obviously NASA’s space program didn’t continue in that direction and before we knew it, space shuttles were the choice craft for space flight. I probably remember far more detail of the launch of the first space shuttle but I can’t say it captivated me in the same way. Any time an Apollo mission was launched, the nation and the world watched. But aside from the first few space shuttle missions (and those that have gone horribly wrong), they are so commonplace today as to garner only brief mention, if any, in the news these days.