Here I am again on my own 
going down the only road I’ve ever known . the kids in the cooler its 3am.Does it ever occur to you where you came from and where you’re going to? Well yes, obviously quite a lot for all of us quite a lot of the time otherwise nothing would ever change at all would it? Mind you I quite like the stream of warm impermanence myself. Anyway, thanks to the BDRC, Cardiff I have recently found out that I have the AKP 1-11 gene (or whatever it is- I wrote it on a bit of paper which I now can’t find!). Now, I’m quite happy about this in some ways because it goes some way to explaining why I’m the way I am although I might have some serious words with the one who passed me the parcel! Anyway as Stipe’s lyric goes " Everybody Here Comes From Somewhere". Over here we have a TV programme called Who Do You Think You Are? which delves into celebrities ancestry for a 30 minute programme and its fascinating. Olivia Colman for example had an Indian great great (great?) grandmother brought over to live in England from India and Danny Dyer (actor) has distant connections to a King of England. Who knew? But you can’t dwell on these things. Life is for living isn’t it? I’m currently trying to save my local pub which has been closed for 5 months now and I’m afraid of it going to rack and ruin. It’s a beautiful building with great potential as a community hub it just needs, well, someone with the will and the means to take it over and run it a la Ryan Reynolds and Wrexham FC. I’m in touch with the big pub chain company owners who are “open to a persuasive offer” (so they said in their last email to me- I tidy up the front garden and clear the rubbish and write to them about it). but I have no idea what that is. Anyway, I’m still waiting for inspiration on that particular project. 
In the meantime the north wind doth blow and we shall have snow 
(and what will the robin do then poor thing ?) he’ll wrap himself up and keep himself warm and put his head under his wing poor thing 
Goodnight y’all (well, that is, no one right now!)
Here I am checking in on murmurs before I go to bed. It’s 10.30pm. My husband is watching a movie on TV “The Body Guard’s Hitman” My son is playing Minecraft. I was born in Australia and come from Italian ancestry. I’m hoping to retire from work in 3 years and spend more time pursuing hobbies. I am not as poetic at writing as you are. 
I’m in New Mexico (USA) and it looks like we’re having our traditional false spring! It’s going to be in the 60’s (F - that’s 15 to 20 C) for the next week and it’s not expected to get below freezing at night. This means that all our poor unsuspecting plants are about to start blooming and growing, the cherry tree will blossom - and, if history is any indicator, we’ll get a hard freeze around the 15th. I keep telling the plants to wait, but they just don’t listen.
On a whim, I started looking at genealogy on my dad’s side of the family (my mom’s sister did her family in detail years ago, so I have that), and it looks a lot like his ancestors, like my mom’s, came to Pennsylvania from England, Ireland, and Germany in the 1600’s and just stayed there. Not very exciting at all, but at least I’m unlikely to have slave owners in my background! Of course, the land they homesteaded was certainly not unoccupied, but the early records are completely silent about that.
I did some genealogy stuff a couple years ago. Mainly poking around on ancestry.com and looking through things my parents had, but it was interesting to find. My cousin had done a lot of work at one point.
My ancestry is northwestern European, coming to the US at various points. My wife’s family is more southeastern European, mostly coming to the US much later. So our kids are quite a mix from all over Europe. My kids’ ancestor furthest back as a US immigrant was one of the first Puritans in Boston in the late 1620s, and their most recent ancestor who was an immigrant arrived on the RMS Olympic in the 1910s.
Yes its just really interesting sometimes to reflect on what makes us all who we are and why we’re the way we are and I guess genes are quite a large part but not the whole of the story.
It’s also the stories of what happened to people. I found out my great-great-grandfather committed suicide by jumping in the river (this was in… the 1880s/1890s maybe? I forget). Which is a weird thing to discover. Surely that had some kind of personality affect on his surviving son, and him on his son, etc.
I guess it helps to be aware of these things (maybe?) if only to guard against them/inform/be aware further down the line. The Victorians were terrors for sweeping things under the carpet and not talking about stuff. All I know is that one of my grandfathers had a “funny brother” who suffered from “neurasthenia” as a result of losing a job (apparently) and lived at home with his parents while going to work. I’m not even sure why that would make him “funny” (this would be “funny peculiar” as opposed to “funny haha” as we distinguish it). Honestly, nobody’s perfect (as Billy Wilder pointed out in the last line of Some Like It Hot) and I don’t get why we/they have/had to pretend we/they are/were. Everybody has faults, we’re just so damned trussed up when it comes to admitting them and it doesn’t do us any good (in my humble opinion). Still, I think things may be changing for the better slowly.
You know, I guess there’s so much we don’t know about a) our forbears lives and b) even our own parents’ circumstances and life experiences. There’s just no time to go into the nitty gritty and we don’t think to ask any questions half the time as we’re all just too busy getting on with it!
To add to this particular topic I forgot to add some photos I took at Eastgate House, Rochester, Kent, England a while back showing the 1590 owner, one Sir Peter Buck. Who knew? A coincidence? It certainly felt strange at the time. Anyway, the place features in Charles Dickens’s works and his Swiss writing chalet is now in the back garden.
Those who know me from the OG murmurs will know that I was adopted, that my parents (adoptive, but they’re the only ones who deserve the title) wouldn’t talk or answer questions about it when I found out by mistake. Since then, I’ve learned about my biological family. I was never one to romanticise about my bio parents, but my father had ethnicity/religious issues and tried to stuff me into a box similar with his own, with no success. Because they had lied to me about where I came from, trust had disappeared and I became a hellion to live with. My parents now had an angry, confused rebel on their hands. Boy, did I give them hell. It was an identity crisis that made me crazy and reckless. I knew it was a “private” adoption. Which means illegal and money changed hands. Skip ahead to the advent of Ancestry.com. I found out who my biological parents were. It wasn’t auspicious information, but it was the truth. My bio mother, Harriet ran wild. She didn’t finish high school, she married a man and had 2 children, my half sister and brother while in her teens. Then she absconded with a Cuban musician, Tino, abandoned her husband and 2 babies to be with him. My sister was born and given up for adoption at birth. 17 months later, I was born, and by now Harriet learned that childless couples would pay good money for babies that fit certain criteria. She found a lawyer who handled this kind of thing, had a meeting with my parents and were matched. My birth took place in a different state to where my parents lived, which is ironic because both sets of parents lived in NYC. But it was a layer of protection. I had a forged birth certificate. It was the only one that ever existed. I was a black market baby. My parents loved me and spoiled me. I felt secure and happy until I was 12 and found the birth certificate which told a truth different to everything I’d been told. Fast forward to 2017. Ancestry.com almost immediately found a full blood sister. We are only 17 months apart, and as her adoption was legal she was able to trace some information about our birth parents. Harriet had severe mental health issues, surrounding having kids and abandoning them. Tino was always travelling for gigs and they spent most of their time in smoky bars where he played. I’m sure drugs were part of the picture. But I had a sister! What a blessing! We’re very alike in temperament and we’re very close. So our origins were not only wildly different to what we had been told by our adoptive parents but also different to everything those parents believed. Here’s a pic of me and my sister in 2017.
Hmmm. Pics not coming out. Hang on…
Kathi & I. First meeting Her daughter asked if we were wearing similar shirts deliberately. Nope. Total happenstance. I’m on the left. My hair is now completely white thanks to covid…
That’s amazing, Etty! There’s something almost eerie about getting to know a biological sibling you didn’t know as a child. I’m glad you found her!
We grew up only 9 miles apart! Me in the Bronx, Kathi in Manhattan. NYC is a place you can pass your sister in the street and just think, “that girl looks like me”. We did look very alike in our 20’s and 30’s.
Kathi had done some investigation into our bio parents, to little avail. Our cousins won’t talk to us. We are Harriet’s spawn, and she’s been erased out of the family. Tino is just impossible to trace. He had a number of aliases. I don’t think he was a bad man, just elusive.
That’s all incredible. What a story. When we all think our own life is so complicated others have even more complicated lives ("lost in our little lives " I guess). You have done amazingly well. 