Bad Heir Day

I don't believe in lying on the ground and looking up at the branches of my family tree, although I am reliably informed that my father's great uncle Hezekiah B. Clark was an amateur genealogist, and when I tell people I have a lot of kinfolk "down under," I'm not talking about Australia, you get what I mean here?


All my antecedents, I honor them, but their stories are their stories, in my opinion. My maternal grandfather's brother Ed was famous in the family for being able to switch hands in the middle of writing a letter. His ambidexterity was the stuff of legends, but I just typed *this* with my left hand and *this* with my right, and no one can tell the difference anyway.

And, let's be honest. You send your cheek swabs off to some company and six weeks later you get a report that says you are 12% Scottish, and you get so mad, someone's gonna get kilt!

For real, I have heard from several people who find their DNA test came back with questionable results, so I'm not sending off any of my cheekiness for testing.  And I hear all the time that we should live in the moment, so why do I want to hear about when my 7th cousin twice removed Abner met and married a waspish syndicate bookkeeper?

But that's just I; what's is prologue, sayeth Shakespeare, and who's related to him?

Schools are getting kids to do family tree projects, and can you imagine that it could lead to confusion?

Rachel Garlinghouse is a mother of four adopted children and she wrote an article called "Teachers, Please Stop Assigning Family Tree Projects," for Scary Mommy dot com, and her point is this: "Not only do families-by-adoption see the numerous problems with such assignments, but so do foster families, families where children do not know who their biological fathers are, and children with many parents, some biological and some not. There are also the children of single parents or children being raised by another relative, such as a grandparent, older sibling, or aunt. There are kids with two moms or two dads and kids with several step-parents."

Tiffani Onwuachi is a mom who told Good Morning America that she was opposed to having her son's teacher assign a family tree project.  Why? "We found out the maternal grandfather was not our grandfather through Ancestry.com," she told the show. "It’s been a little sticky to say the least."

I will admit to having grown up in the Ozzie and Harriet era with two parents and one sibling and everything was standard.  Boring, but standard. In fact, when a new kid came to our class in fourth grade, the teacher had him wait in the hall while she explained to us that his parents were divorced so he lived with just his father.  She might as well have told us his name was Oliver and he worked with a group of young men who separated people from their wallets.

I suppose that this can be a good way for the young'uns to learn that Uncle Nutsy came to the family by jumping off a tramp steamer off the coast of Nova Scotia. They have been wondering why he's always tieing charger cords into exotic knots and hollering "Ahoy" when he picks them up after soccer.