Ancestry

Somewhere close at hand in my computer but as infinitely far away as technology can hide it, is the info I received after I spit into a vial and sent it in to Ancestry.com. The test kit was a gift, and a good one. After all, I've spent far more time weighing my own familial past than most people do or should. 

The truth is, I didn't believe my DNA would spot much of what I didn't already know--in places of origin anyway; and on that score, I was right. All of my ancestry originates in Holland, every last one of the forebearers, and that's a lean-to full of wooden shoes. Ancestry's revelations don't even distinguish the Netherlands. Most all of me, they would have me believe, comes from northern Europe. Well, duh. 

I know a woman who sent in a vial and discovered what has been troubling her ever since, that her father wasn't her father. She's now met the man who sired her (rough language, but in this case it sort of fits), so she's in the uncomfortable position of feeling she should let the man who falsely believes he fathered her know that he didn't. 

Her DNA was a startling revelation. Mine, not so. 

I've been reading Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch Immigrants, by a writer with the impossibly Frisian name of Hylke Speerstra, a book translated into English by an old friend, Henry Baron. I'm only half through, but that book has already told me more about my identity than Ancestry's DNA readings, even though the joys and sorrows of immigration are completely forgotten, 150 years back in my family history. 

Like so many of the Frisian immigrants Mr. Speerstra interviews in the book, Hetty Seif-Lettinga, who lives in Grand Rapids, has a family album full of dairymen. "Ten big farms, some are millionaires," she says; and then "one has an embryo-factory where they, so to speak, make cows." 

Telling the writer that fact trips a land mine. Hetty is not young, and philosophical reflection comes easily to someone so thus practiced in old-time Dutch Calvinism. 

"But what I wanted to ask you:" she says, "what do you think, will there be factories in the near future where they can make both cows and people? I don't think they should do that. They should leave that to the Creator. Though it's true that there are some strange creatures running around." 

"What do you think?" she says, nevermind the fact that he's there to interview her, she tells him she wants to know what he believes. She can't help herself because the question is not a trifle. Her guest is, after all, a perfectly thoughtful gent from the old country. Heck with small talk, Speerstra, tell me straight up what you think because I want to know. 

That quarrelsome questioning is, I believe, as sharp and tasty as a Wilhelmina peppermint. So many of the people of her vintage I know or knew delight in that genre of ponderable questions.

And now she's on a roll. "I don't think they should do that." She drops the gloves, ready at a moment's notice to have at it, but ready also with her own best answer: she tells him forthwith, "They should leave that to the Creator."  

The whole mini-debate will be framed by her principled, foundational perspective: it's God's business to decide on identity, she tells him, unabashed. The Creator should be doing that work, not us. She wants a debate, but she's not afraid of letting this guy in her kitchen know she has an opinion and, dang it, it's based firmly on the inviolable Word of the Lord. 

To me, all of that sounds perfectly familiar, right out of the Schaap family scrapbook. 

And then that absolutely perfect last line: "Though it's true that there are some strange creatures running around." 

And that line nails it. Ancestry should have located Hetty's monologue in my DNA. That final line, as much as anything in her little outburst, wears wooden shoes. Not only do the "strange creatures running around" undercut the ferocity of the doctrinal authority she just now espoused, they're a joke, an earthy one at that, something she shouldn't have said but couldn't help herself. That smirking last line is as Dutch as her principles.

Listen, it cost someone in my family $50 for me to spit in that Ancestry vial. I bought Speerstra's book used, on Amazon, for less than five bucks, only to know that, sure as anything, this woman in Michigan, Hetty Seif-Lettinga, a woman I've never met, holds down some secure position in my genetic code.