The desire to find out our ancestry and heritage seems to be a uniquely American pastime, at least as a conversational topic. It’s a special part of our identity to claim that we are Irish, Mexican, Italian, African, Puerto Rican, Greek, Asian, Cuban, etc. Go to any prominent American’s Wikipedia page, and nine times out of ten under early life, personal life, or family there will be a description of that person’s ancestral expat profile. I thought for a while that this was just New World baggage. I imagine if one asks a western European millennial their heritage, you would get a generic response of “my mom is from x village and my dad is from x town, and their parents lived there for generations since the beginning of time.” The Americas are populated with people of whom the majority have roots only within the last four centuries. It’s interesting that this external national pride fits so well under the umbrella of American patriotism. It would seem almost downright un-American to not have a nice little prefix to modify the -American handle.

I asked my boyfriend recently if he would be interested in receiving a 23andme kit as a gift for some future occasion after I recently received the results back of my own kit (this entire post exists to detail that, bare with me). He looked at me as if I was clueless.

“Why would I do that?” he said. “I’m Mexican.”

He thought his results would come back in the form of a pie chart filled with tacos.

“Mexican isn’t that simple,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be interested to see the breakdown of which parts of your ancestry and genetics are European versus native?”

“Not really.”

So maybe it really is just an American thing. For him, his dad is from the D.F., his mother from Puebla, their families there for generations prior. Sure someone on a Cortés boat probably screwed up the pool a bit, but the water is mostly Mexican and he’s okay with that.

I’ve always been told that my story is this: my great-uncle did all of the research about 20 years ago and found that every Newcomer (no pun intended) in this country came from three brothers (Wolfgang, Peter, and Christian) who sailed over from a tiny town outside of Bern, Switzerland in the mid-1600s. Their children then settled in Pennsylvania Dutch country for two hundred years before my faction broke off to live in Indiana and basically everyone was just a boring WASP-y farmer until happy ol’ me popped out. On the other side, my mother’s maiden Fontaines came from the south of France to Quebec in the 1700’s to do the whole Montreal poutine thing until that got old a hundred years later, they moved to Rhode Island and led equally uneventful French-WASP-y lives until happy ol’ me popped out. Oh, and throw Harriet Beecher Stowe somewhere in the mix.

I never questioned this narrative until my sophomore year of college. After a full year of being on the National Marrow Donor Registry, I was called to donate bone marrow to a woman whom I was only allowed to learn lived in Colombia as I was recovering in post-op and my marrow on a plane to another continent. Even under the accepting bliss of propofol and morphine induced sedation, this immediately made no sense to me. I was a perfect HLA-type match with this woman. For her to accept my bone marrow, we would have to be ethnically or at least very genetically similar, right?

I grilled my mother when I returned home the next week.

“Do I have to book a spot on Maury, or can you just make this easy for me?”

“Your father is your father, Michael,” my mom said, looking bored if not irritated. I was determined.

“My ‘father’ is not Colombian. By all accounts, neither are you. There’s medical proof I’m your progeny. Who the Daddy?”

We went back and forth like this for weeks, only half in jest, until I would let it die down for a few months before bringing it up again.

To be fair, this does all seem a little harsh given the limited evidence. This woman living in Colombia could have very likely been some European expat’s grandchild (fingers crossed, no fascist ties). However, my doubts were planted by a comment my father had made when I came out to him a year earlier.

Also under the influence of post-colonoscopy anaesthetic (I tend to have large life revelations under medical sedation), I cleared all of the nurses out of the room and decided that this was the most perfect time and place to tell my father I was gay. Being the most inopportune time to make that disclosure, my father waived away the discussion until later in the evening when I wasn’t slurring my words in a hospital gown. After the obligatory “I still love you, not that surprised, etc,” he capped off the conversation with: “You really had me worried when you cleared all the nurses out of the room, I thought you were going to tell me something crazy, like I wasn’t your father or something. *nervous chuckle*”

So really Dad, if you’re reading this, sorry, but you started it.

(I’d like to note that yes, I see the humor in the fact that I came out to my father immediately after having a scope snaked through my colon, as it has been pointed out repeatedly. I find the connection offensive albeit obviously hilarious, so if you weren’t thinking about it before, I’ve gone ahead and built that mental bridge for you now so that you don’t have to feel guilty about it when it inevitably comes, as you should, you terrible person.)

Two years and multiple interrogations later, I woke up Christmas morning to find a beautifully wrapped 23andme kit under the tree, compliments of my mother.

“If this is what it takes to get you off my back, so be it.” The spirit of Christmas is alive and well.

For the uninitiated, 23andme is a human genotyping company that extracts your DNA from a saliva sample. They map out all 23 chromosomes in full, giving you access to relatively accurate ancestral data along with genetic traits and access to your raw genetic data to do your own research.

Turns out this story is pretty anti-climactic. I’m WASP-y. Super duper WASP-y, no spice. Hope is lost that Shakira is my long lost cousin. There is good reason I can’t make arepas and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos make my ears bleed. Results below:

I understand that it is not normal to be disappointed when the family unit you grew up with and was led to believe are yours turn out to actually be yours, and I’m not. However, when you imagine that there’s some Colombian relative out there who’s an esteemed Salsa dancer or coke mule (I’m not picky), one does feel a little deflated. Just a little.

The surprise came later. After turning in my kit, my sister, mother and father all decided they wanted to give it a go to in rapid succession. Another cool feature of 23andme is that you can share your data with other users to connect with genetic relatives you may not know about. Once you connect your mother and father, you can then see what side of the family you are related to your long lost third cousin through.

Once all of the results came in, no big ancestral surprises arose. I share more genetic traits with my mother than my father, which makes sense as we share more physical traits. My father has more Middle Eastern ancestry than one would expect, and he is unjustly perturbed in my opinion that he has more neanderthal genetic data than the general population.

It came when my sister called to tell me that my father’s results had come in.

“Queue the figurative manilla envelope,” she drumrolled. “Dad is your father.”

Sorry Shakira, it could’ve been great.

“There’s something funny here though, I keep getting share requests from these cousins in Indiana, and guess what side we’re related to them on?”

“Seems like a 50/50 WASP roll.” I said.

“Better sit down for this one,” she said. “Both.”

Apparently my parents are distant cousins of a few removed generations. They share no immediate genetic data, and to be fair, one could make the argument that we are all distant relatives, but being close enough to have a genetic typing company match them both to relatives is skeevy. In addition to being a proud British/Irish/French-American, I’m also an inbred American. The past few months, I’ve wondered where to go now that I’ve finished college and moved home in the interim. To the foothills of Kentucky I go, to be with my true people.

Thanks 23andme, for bursting the bubble that I might be Pablo Escobar’s nephew and generally making me feel gross.

Stay tuned for Pt. 2 of this series, 5 Things My Genetic Data Told Me That I Already Knew and 10 I Could’ve Lived Without Knowing.