AtF: Family Follies

Aight, so I’ve got a little side project I haven’t gotten around to, so I don’t have much time for AtF.  Still, I haven’t really done one the last couple weeks and I’m not expecting to be able to get to it next week, either.  So I feel compelled to do something.

Fortunately, my world has recently been rocked by sad, tragic, and crazy news.

See, it turns out I might not actually be quite as Norwegian as I’ve always been told.  I might not even be Norwegian.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment.  I’m assuming it will be as difficult for you to take as it was for me.  You ready to go on?  Good.

So here’s what happened:

There was a man.  His name, as I recall, was Ned.  He came over to America from the Old Country with his wife.  Ned and his wife then had children.  Their children had children.  One of those children was my grandmother.  My grandmother married a Swede, so the general theory was that my mother was half Norwegian and half Swedish.

My cousin gave my mother a book of local history for her birthday.  Why there exists in this world a book of local history for a town in Minnesota that aspires to be a dot on the map is completely and totally beyond me.  But that’s how it goes.

In this book of local history my mother learned that ol’ Ned’s wife didn’t actually make it to America.  He had a second wife.  Who might have been Swedish.  This actually explains a lot.

See, my grandmother knew a lot of Norwegian.  She’s not fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but she picked up words and phrases and terms.  She has a friend who is fluent in Norwegian.  He’s told her that she doesn’t actually know Norwegian.

So we’re talking genealogy, here.  We’re talking a screwed up genealogy.  And we’re talking about a genealogy from which I am only four generations removed.  We can also assume that, even if my particular ancestors weren’t particularly literate, they came from a society which was.

However, my family relies on oral tradition.  Nobody’s ever written the stories down.  Nobody’s ever traced the family tree on paper.  Something got lost in the not-so-distant past.  And, as it turns out, that means that it’s entirely possible that I’m not even Norwegian.

For my purposes, that’s not really a big deal.  But pretend, for just a moment, that I was a claimant to the throne of Norway.  Now, all of the sudden, that makes a world of difference.

I don’t have to explain why this relates to AtF.  Unfortunately, Bill Cooper would probably ignore it, because, hey, my family history ain’t the Bible.

Whatever.