Series/Personal History/Life

Worlds Apart? My Search for my Ancestry: Part One

My DNA Journey

I have always felt lost. Lost between two worlds. The world I inhabit: a world I do not wholly trust as authentic, and a different world; a world that is completely unknown to me. This is because I have grandparents, and perhaps other relatives that I have never met. I have, therefore, for my whole life, felt as though part of myself is missing.

As a child, and young woman, I was full up with unanswered and unspoken questions about my heritage. I wanted to know who my real grandparents were.

Without giving away personal details, I can tell you something of what I mean.

Here Goes

I distrusted history lessons at school. The one-sided rhetoric about The British Empire didn’t sit well with me as I sat in my history lessons attempting to listen as a young teenager. It was a self-aggrandising affair. How could we be better at everything than everybody else? How could we have been first at everything? ‘We seem to imagine we are such great conquerers’, I remember thinking; this was a one-sided view of everything.

Perhaps I had a distrusting perspective on those history lessons because I already knew my mother was second generation Irish and then this was not something to celebrate it was something to be ashamed of. There were so many jokes about how stupid the Irish were. Later, I learnt that ridicule and jokes were a method used to subjugate and control. And yet, now that we are having a highly reported conversation, or conversations about reparations to those countries that we plundered and thought of as part of our empire, I wonder why do we never speak of Ireland?

I may be less Irish than I imagine. Still this question haunts me. This question compelled me to write my debut novella; a literary sequel to Jane Eyre entitled Bertha’s Journal: A Perfect Immleman Turn, which I jointly published in 2012 when I was an undergraduate. Perhaps I wrote back to that particular novel because I saw something of myself in it. The lost child protagonist was someone I could identify with. I have always felt myself something of a Jane Eyre figure. Never quite whole.

Perhaps I too feel as capable of reducing a man to a maimed and blinded automaton as Jane Eyre was (an element of the novel which is rarely discussed) because of my unvoiced, defiant rage. Inflicting my own sort of unspoken psychological wound, which I carry around as if I myself were orphaned because I cannot undo my own. Am I being too harsh on myself?

Yet, where do the lost generations go to? Where do we who never met our grandparents thrive? What heirlooms, or unspoken history do we carry to our graves?

How to heal this wound that seeps like history. How to unmake it? Is it possible.

Well, I am afraid. I am afraid to take those three or four deliberate steps and apply for a DNA test. Perhaps I will find out the rumours were just rumours and there is nothing to find out. Something small, or petty happened. I am not as much of an orphaned grandchild as I would like to imagine.

But one thing I will find out is what sort of second generation I am. That is my most pressing question. Where did my father’s parents come from. Why was he adopted by a Russian during WWII? And, why did they have to guess his age by looking at his teeth?

My father was happy with the mother who adopted him. He never spoke of any memories of his birth mother. He said he had no interest in knowing her.

Perhaps, I will never know these things. I will let you know how I get on now that I have pressed all the buttons. I eagerly wait to find out.

Key Message: Without roots we are lost, adrift on a Wide Sargasso Sea, as Jean Rhys described it in the book by the same name written as a prelude to Jane Eyre.