Eurotrash

So I'm obsessed with Ancestry.com. It's pretty awesome. You wouldn't believe how many family secrets I've found out just by snooping around in old census records and the like. For example, my mother always told me stories about her Grandma Packer. I posted a picture of her on this blog several months ago:

Dead chickens in one hand, grandbaby in the other. I posed this question before, but I'll repeat it here: do they even make women like this anymore? Women like this built the West. Looking at this picture, I wouldn't be surprised if this woman built the West singlehandedly.

The majority of the branches of my family tree extend back hundreds of years, but Grandma Packer's branch ended with her. Nobody knew who her parents were, where they came from, nothing. When my Uncle George came to visit a few months ago, I asked him why that was. He told me the story he heard was that she was left on somebody's doorstep when she was a baby. He said he used to have a copy of her marriage certificate which listed her parents' names as "unknown."

After a LOT of digging, I finally found her in the 1870 census in Clear Creek, Iowa. She's 3 years old, she has been adopted by Frederick and Magdalene Jenlink (birthplace: Prussia), but her father's birthplace is listed as France, and her mother's birthplace is listed as Ireland. So now I presume that her adoptive parents must have known her biological parents fairly well, at least well enough to know where they're from, and besides, who hands their baby over to strangers? I'm dying to know the rest of the story. It sounds juicy.

So after a rough start in life, she marries John Anthony, they have a son (my maternal grandfather), and then her husband promptly leaves her and the baby. She makes her way to Spokane, lists herself as a widow in the 1910 census (although she's not a widow--John Anthony has remarried and started a new family in Iowa). She then hooks up with (but never marries) a British dude from London named Harry Packer. They live together for at least 15 years, but then he leaves her, marries some other lady, and moves to the next town. In the phone book, she begins listing herself as the widow of Harry Packer, although he's not dead and she wouldn't be his widow even if he were. 

At this point, I'm feeling awfully sorry for my old Granny Packer. Abandoned by her parents, abandoned by her first husband, abandoned by her sugar daddy...how does all that abandonment not mess with your head? She sounded like such a great lady. My mom adored her. Here's a photo of the two of them outside my mom's home in Nespelem, WA:

So as with any addiction, I now require increasingly higher dosages of genealogy to get a fix. I started watching the show "Finding Your Roots" on PBS, which was satisfying for a while. Then I added "Who Do You Think You Are" on NBC, but that was tragically cancelled after three seasons. Lucky for me, the original BBC series of the same name is still going strong. So now I'm reduced to trolling YouTube late at night, watching fragments of bootleg episodes involving obscure British celebrities I've never heard of. That's how it starts, people. One minute you're like, "It's no big deal. I can quit any time," and the next thing you know, you're mailing in your bodily fluids to have your DNA genetically mapped.

I'm not kidding.

I don't know what possessed me. One look at my pasty-white flesh and you can pretty much assume that I'm about as white-bread European as it gets. I don't need no stinking DNA test to tell me that. But, such is the nature of my addiction. Here's what my saliva revealed:

(Ok, I keep trying to upload the pie chart graphic showing my ethnic breakdown, but it's not working. Grr. Basically it says I am 64% Scandinavian, 14% Southern European, 11% Eastern European, and 11% British Isles.)

Weird. I'm a lot more Scandinavian than I thought. No wonder I love IKEA. I was expecting to be only about 25% Scandinavian, though, because my paternal grandfather is 100% Danish. However, according to the info that came with my results, genetics don't really work that way. One explanation for my beefy Scandinavian stock is that the Jutes (from Denmark) and Vikings each took their turn invading, raiding, and intermarrying all over England and Scotland, where 90% of my most recent ancestors came from. Another explanation is that the DNA we inherit from our parents is variable and not usually divided into neat little halves like I expected. For example, if your father is 50% Japanese, your own Japanese makeup could be anywhere between 0 and 50%. This means that each one of my siblings could have a pie chart that looks totally different from mine. I might have gotten all of the Swedish meatball DNA, and my siblings might have gotten more kielbasa or fish 'n chips DNA. Fascinating. 

Still puzzled by the Eastern and Southern European ancestry, because I can't find anyone from those regions in my research, but I guess I just chalk it up to the migrations of different groups of people around Europe. (Alicia, I wonder if your DNA test would reveal a Scandimexican ancestry, as you suspected?)

Wild. But it's like my cousins from ABBA said:

Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk

She says I began to sing long before I could talk

And I've often wondered, how did it all start?