SHORTS, NOVELS, AND OTHER THINGS

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SHORTS, NOVELS, AND OTHER THINGS

Happy St. Patrick’s Day – Surprise, I’m Irish!

Today is a rather special St. Patrick’s Day for me.  I’ve always worn green on the 17th of March but felt like phony because I wasn’t Irish.  For years, I had heard stories about my ancestry – English, French and Polish – backed by stories from my family on both sides.  Also maybe Native American?  So in December I decided to find out for certain, and bought a DNA kit from Ancestry.com and sent in a saliva sample.  It took almost nine weeks, and the results were a surprise.  Large percentages of my DNA were indeed English, western European (French) and Eastern European(the Polish) but also 12% Irish!

I recently took a trip to Maine to do some research and learned that Maine was a major center for potato production for many years, and still is (there’s a potato research facility just south of Presque Isle), because many Irish immigrated to Maine and southern Canada during the potato famine and brought their agriculture with them.

Then I recalled that my father had once mentioned offhandedly that his family, the Parsons, had settled in Maine a long time ago.  Lightbulb!  Parsons is an Irish name and maybe they came to Maine during the potato famine.  So now I need to get on Ancestry and do a little research.

Anyone else out there interested in their ancestry?

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4 thoughts on “Happy St. Patrick’s Day – Surprise, I’m Irish!”

  1. Yay! Now you can celebrate with a Guinness beer. We’ve been thinking about the ancestry test, except I think I know what mine would say. My mother and father both are from the same small village in Romania. Their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, not sure how many generations back, but many, are all from the same area. Don’t think there’ll be too many surprises in mine.
    I see you’re also Eastern European, like me. 🙂 Woo-hoo!

  2. I have cousins on both sides of my family who have done a good deal of research on our family trees. No skeletons to speak of yet – on the one side there’s a boat builder, on the other a Scottish lead miner. A lot of mariners in the family – not surprisingly, really. Tends to happen when you live on an island 🙂

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