Grandma Lottie

---

Years ago I came to terms with looking like my father's mother, Grandma Minnie. I have her pallor and her blue eyes, as well as (naturally) her inner sweetness.

Now the page has turned.

I posted a photo of myself on Facebook not long ago, posing in a pink knit hat, as follows:

Very nice, everyone said. Then my cousin Linda piped up with: "Did you know that, with that scowl, you look just like Grandma Lottie?"

When I peeled myself off the ceiling, I wrote back to her immediately to acknowledge that she was right. I even dug out an ancient photo of me in 1970, posing with Grandma Lottie in front of her house, which further proved the point:

Grandma Lottie was my mother's mother. She was consistently dour and seldom wore her teeth unless absolutely necessary, which makes two of us. Despite her forbidding look, however, she was always sweet and kind to me; I remember the smell of food cooking in her little kitchen, and I remember walking with her in her garden (where she often gave me plants and cuttings). The photo at the head of this piece, probably taken in the 1920s, is nice: she’s almost smiling in a Mona Lisa way.

Grandma Lottie married three times, which is enough to make anyone look dour and forbidding. My grandfather was her second husband; he died in a mine cave-in around 1926, so I never got to meet him. My mother, who was only six or so when he died, always said he was a very nice man; I wish I could have known him.

Anyway, back to Grandma Lottie. It’s plain that she wasn’t a smiler. But what's wrong with that? I think smiling is overrated. It's supposed to make you feel good, right? It's supposed to make other people feel kindly toward you? I wonder. Greeting a stranger with a wintry glare can be a very bracing experience, and it's strangely productive: it sets people back on their heels and makes them wonder what they've done wrong.

It gives you the advantage.

As I told cousin Linda: I'm proud to carry Grandma Lottie's scowl and black-framed glasses into the new generation.

Somebody's gotta do it.

---

Resolutions 2014

---

If you want to know how I feel about New Year’s resolutions in general, please see the above illustration. “Foo” says it all.

But I love the idea of resolutions. What could be nicer than making a fresh start? Suddenly “next year” becomes “this year,” and we have an entire nice expanse of time before us, like a yardful of untrodden snow.

So let’s make us some resolutions!

1)    Stop complaining. Foo. No chance.

2)    Be healthy. Easier said than done, but there’s no way 2014 could be worse than 2013 from a health point of view. If I can manage to keep my organs from actually dropping out of my body this year, I will be doing okay

3)    Appreciate the good things more. This might actually be doable. Today’s bitterly cold in Providence, for example, but the sky is a lovely blue. Why not appreciate the lovely blue sky, even while cursing the weather?

4)    Maximize the love in the world. As a deeply flawed person, it amazes me that people actually like me, and I try whenever I can to return the favor. I already tell Partner several times a day how much I love him. I am also lucky enough to have friends – Patricia and Apollonia – whom I truly love, and who express their love for me in various oddball ways. I have always appreciated this, and after my illness I appreciate it even more.

5)    Work on the family history. This has been going on for over twenty years; I leave it and come back to it, mostly assembling records and keeping track of marriages and deaths. It’s fun and instructional, which brings me back to it, and incredibly tedious, which drives me away again.

6)    Practice my ukulele chords. Every day. I promise.

And finally:

7)    Be a better person.

Foo.

---

Grampa Narciso Vinci

---

My mother’s family history was (supposedly) a simple story: an Italian grandfather just off the boat, who married a nice Polish girl. That should make for a nice simple genome, right?

Not so much. According to the 23andMe database, my genome shows similarities to people from Hungary, Finland, and the Czech Republic. I have a small but significant segment of “Balkan” DNA, not to mention a drop of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

So what happened back in Europe, with my great-grandparents and their forebears?

I know a little about my Polish grandmother Lottie, but almost nothing of my Italian grandfather Narciso. He was dapper and handsome, and he liked posing for the camera – look:

Mom always said he was good with kids; naturally she’d say something like that, but then again, there’s this nice picture of him posing with his kids and stepchildren (I think the one with a bucket on his head is my late uncle Primo):

According to my great-aunt Estelle, Grandpa Narciso was a bit of a dog. He romanced both my grandma Lottie and her sister Julia at the same time; Grandma got pregnant first, so she won the prize (so to speak), and Mom was born a few months after the wedding.

Grandpa Narciso died in a mining accident 1926, when my mother was six years old.

I did a Google search for “Narciso Vinci” the other night, and found his name listed on a website documenting the people buried in the Old Wilkeson Cemetery in Pierce County, Washington State. The website included this note:

Old Wilkeson City Cemetery, Wilkeson, Pierce County, Washington.

(There are two cemeteries at this location. The old Cemetery was

overgrown and all but forgotten; the data is from the old Cemetery only)

Submitted By: Ryan William Wagner as part of his Eagle Scout Project

which included cleaning the headstones and clearing the overgrowth.)

Good for Eagle Scout Ryan William Wagner, for cleaning off my grandfather’s grave and recording his name.

---

Genetic origins

---

Partner and I are doing one of those DNA analysis things.  Some of them give you health information, and possible relationships with other test subjects; this one is a bargain-basement test (basically the same test the FBI uses to identify murder suspects) which checks and identifies thirteen genes.  It will then compare our genome (or, rather, those thirteen bits of it) to an international database, and tell us our (possible) countries of genetic origin.

 

 

Nothing for sure, of course; it’s too generic for that.  But the results will be interesting.  Origins are mysterious; maybe even a rough idea would be nice.

 

 

The modern USA was founded by lots of Europeans who basically swamped the original population, wiped them out with war and disease, and replaced them.  Australia followed the same pattern.

 

 

But in much of the rest of the world, this was not the case.

 

 

Africa was conquered by Europeans, but never swamped.  India, ditto.   Siberia, ditto.  South America – well, parts of it, anyway. 

 

 

And then there’s Europe.

 

 

Back in 1903, a man’s skeleton was found in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England.  It was dated to approximately 7000 BCE.  Cheddar Man’s mitochondrial DNA was sequenced in the 1990s, and then – just for laughs – it was compared to the mitochondrial DNA of people living in the neighborhood.

 

 

There were found to be two exact matches, and one almost-exact match.

 

 

Nine thousand years later, Cheddar Man still had some relatives in the neighborhood.

 

 

The Maghreb (which includes all of North Africa west of Egypt) is considered to be part of the “Arab world.” Oh, really?  It was, and is, the Berber world.  It absorbed its invaders: the Arabs, the Romans, the Visigoths, the French, the Italians, the Spanish. 

 

 

And best of all:

 

 

Apollonia, about to leave for her most recent European trip, was excitedly talking about visiting her family up on the Alpine heights of northern Italy, and the history of her family’s village, and its pre-Roman roots.  Excitedly she Googled a reconstructed picture of Oetzi the Iceman, the 5300-year-old mummy found near the Austrian-Italian border, not far from her family’s hometown.  “Look at him!” she crowed.  “It’s my uncle Ettore!  It’s my nonno!”

 

 

And, strangely enough (though I didn’t say this to Apollonia), Oetzi looks a little bit like my grandma.

 

 

Origins are mysterious. 

 

 

But let’s wait for the DNA results before we say more.

---

 

 

I am the Queen of England

---

My great-great-grandmother Mary Rowe fell for the 19th-century “Bogardus hoax,” which alleged that if you could prove your descent from a person named Aneka Jans Bogardus, you were part-owner of a big chunk of property in downtown Manhattan. American courts were clogged with these cases for a while. My poor great-great-grandmother died in the loony bin, still clutching her legal documents, or so we are told.

 

 

The secret attraction here was not only the promise of money, but the allure of royalty. Aneka Jans was supposedly a daughter of “King William of Holland.” And don't we all wish we were descended from royalty?

 

My grandmother Minnie found her grandmother Mary's various family trees and affidavits, and caught the genealogy bug. My aunt Louise has kept the franchise going; she published a gorgeous book, “The Pioneer Spirit,” which incorporates much of the research she and her sister Lucille and their husbands have done over the years.

 

I have done my tiny bit to help. Early on, however, I gained a healthy respect for what Louise and Lucille and Minnie and even crazy great-great-grandma Mary accomplished. It's hard work! You end up with a tangled heap of contradictory claims. Even the reference books aren't very authoritative.

 

But wait until you hear this!

 

Some years ago I discovered a website called Geni.com, which allows you to upload and share family information. I noticed the other day that someone had added a little extra info on my seven-times-great-grandfather Luke Bromley. It turns out that his wife, Hannah Stafford, was not only a Stafford (the family of the Dukes of Buckingham), but was also descended from the Woodvilles, and the Percys, and the Poles, and the Bohuns. It's a regular Who's Who in Fifteenth-Century England. Ultimately, the family goes back to King Edward III and Philippa of Hainault.

 

Dearie me! Royalty at last! Great-great-grandma Mary would be thrilled!

 

 

In the words of a poem in the National Lampoon back in the 1970s:

 

I am the Queen of England,

I like to sing and dance,

And if you don't believe me,

I will punch you in the pants.

 

And I'll do it, too.

 

---