Who’s Your Daddy?
Some time back after watching an episode of Finding Your Roots on PBS, I became interested in finding my own. Provided they weren’t buried under the asphalt of a Walmart parking lot, I secretly hoped I might have family ties to Pee Wee Herman or Gumby. Being only mildly curious and essentially cheap, I didn’t intend to spend a lot on a service that provides ancestry information, so I kept my eyes open and found one sounding highly professional and low-cost listed on the back of a grocery store receipt. They promised big things, such as being able to trace my ancestry back to an amoeba crawling through Paleozoic slime. All that was required of me was to stuff an old sock with my cash payment in small, unmarked bills into a Ziploc bag and send it off. Simple enough, right? My eagerly-awaited report came back stating that I was a descendant of Adam and Eve, making my Paternal Haplogroup A-1, and that I currently have nearly eight billion DNA relatives.
I called to complain.
“Good morning. Ancestors-R-Us.”
“There’s a surprising lack of detail in my report.”
“Fred! Get in here! Some bozo’s got a gripe.”
“Yeah? What’s you beef?”
“My report isn’t very complete.”
“Whadda you mean? We traced you back farther than any other ancestry service as promised. How ‘bout I send you a coupon for a free haircut?”
“No thanks.”
“How ‘bout a free Big Mac?”
“Where’s the name of my ancestral amoeba?”
“Uh…lost to posterity. Your family amoeba was scarfed up by a hungry paramecium.”
“If my progenitor was ingested by some other one-celled life form, how then can I exist?”
“Look in a mirror. If you don’t see yourself, you don’t. Have a nice day.” Click.
Well, I guess you get what you pay for.
Undaunted and wishing for additional details, I went with a different service. It was comforting to learn that all my ancestors were human-type sentient beings. Although there were no Pee Wee or green clay DNA matches, I am related (this is true) to Marie Antoinette and Prince Philip. Also (another true surprise), somewhere back in the 17th Century my family acquired some Native-American blood, perhaps on a night a relative of mine shared too much firewater with Indian maidens of a local tribe. This information could be an addendum to the written accounts of interactions between Pilgrims and Indians in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Because I now know that I’m related to the late husband of Queen Elizabeth, I’m surely somewhere in line for succession to the British throne. When the next big asteroid hits Earth and wipes out most of the British Empire, provided I’m not vaporized I’ll be standing at the front door of Buckingham Palace waiting to enter to take my seat on the throne.
A final note: As of the last issue of The Voice, I see Mr. Bill “QAnon” Suheyda is still sniveling over poor Trump being picked on by everybody, and still dredging up already-discounted stuff from years ago about Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden. He’d be better off spending his time checking to see if he shares any DNA with Gumby.