All tagged family memories

Happy Birthday, Sis. Remember That Epic Road Trip?

This past week my sister, Leigh, celebrated her birthday. Mine is in a couple of weeks. I love that they are both in the same month. I wanted to take the occasion to write a post about what she means to me. I think she knows. I hope she knows. But either way, sharing my love for her with the internet universe just feels right this year.

Leigh and I have shared over four decades of life together. That is a lot of memories and lived experiences. Like most sibling relationships, the highlights include family road trips, epic temper tantrums, and periods of infrequent communication. We are the only two who endured our parents’ alcoholic disfunction, and that alone feels like a badge of something. Certainly not honor, but, hey, we survived in the trenches and are probably closer because of it.

So of all the sister stories I could share in these following few hundred words, the one that I want to write about was when Leigh and I drove from Tacoma to Minneapolis in July 2001 for our paternal grandmother’s funeral.

Discovering More About My Ancestry By Doing an Ancestry DNA Test Kit

A year or so before my Dad died in 2019, he gave me several copies of a document I would describe as a family tree scroll of my paternal side of my family. Going back three generations, it lays out on about a four-foot stretch of letter-sized paper taped together, the family relations of my grandfather and his father before that. My great-grandfather was born in Sweden in the early 1800s. Dad gave me the scrolls, I think, to start a dialogue and suggest we take a trip back to Sweden soon to visit the family homestead. Unfortunately, we didn't know that he would get diagnosed with cancer shortly after and then die. I mourn the trip that never happened.

I didn't look at the scrolls again until I took an Ancestry DNA kit. My step-mom had taken one a few years ago and said how cool it was to see what her genetics told her about her ancestral heritage. A few of my cousins and my sister have taken one as well. If you aren't familiar with how Ancestry DNA works, you submit a saliva sample for a fee of $99 (or less if you can catch a sale). They analyze it and list the results in a database that can match you up with other people who share your DNA who have also submitted samples.