So Senator John Kerry has a mixed up ethnic background?
Well join the club. I found out the same deal when I had
to put together a family tree during the 1970s. While other kids
at school gave one-word answers to their ancestry, my response was that
we had information that ultimately traced back to 1066. That's
right, not a typo - 1066. My Uncle in Florida has all the information,
including our ties to Alexander Hamilton, Phillip Freneau (American
Revolutionary poet), and even French bigwigs (watch it with that guillotine
pal).
Back on my father's side, Scotland and France are the
final destinations, but along the way Ireland and England figure in
heavily. If my line moved from Scotland to Ireland, but stayed
there for two hundred years can I claim Irish lineage? Actor Aidan
Quinn moved back and forth from Chicago to Ireland, never fully gaining
acceptance by either, always mumbling, careful not to speak with a "foreign"
accent. U2's Bono is the product of a mixed Catholic/Protestant
marriage, and my extended family currently has three of these. Regardless
of the surname, there's always another side - mom's. Many times
one side of the family has no idea and no records to speak of - making
one-word generalizations easy, but woefully inadequate. This is
the case on my mother's side.
Last month my mom called to tell me that she was actually
born in a hospital in New Jersey (so she's an honorary Soprano), and
lived in the Bronx (like Jenny From the Block) as a child. She
is over 70, but never knew this before. She also doesn't have
a lot of information on her own mother, who died when she was a young
girl. It's only through internet searches that we've begun to
find out anything more than sketchy details. My Grandfather, brought
up with German/Lutheran traditions, remarried - making an Irish Catholic
woman my new Grandma. Now am I Irish?
Start a conversation about family history and you'll
get surprising results. I remember one friend explaining that
her name was boiled down to one syllable because the original name back
in Switzerland was too complicated. You hear the same story from
Lithuanians, Polish, and of course Greeks. "My Big Fat Greek
Wedding" is the most successful independent movie of all time,
paying light-hearted tribute to a culture that has yet to fully join
the American mainstream. To some degree of course, every ethnic
group has a "Big Fat" story to tell. Canadian friends
may tell you that America is a melting pot while they prefer to remain
a multiethnic stew. Here in Massachusetts we love our Irish politicians,
even when they're WASP, Italian, Jewish, Austrian, or whatever.
And one of these days we're going to get the memo about judging a book
by it's cover.
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