DAZE WORK: Ancestry results pale in all comparison

During my COVID quarantine I had probably seen the Ancestry.com TV commercial a dozen times before I bit and sent them my $100.

Not sure why Ancestry.com won me over. After all, I’ve never had a yearning to build a boat out of Flex Steel tape or make a pillow fort out of a few $20 My Pillows.

I guess taking advantage of my extra time by spitting into a tube and sending it off to Ancersty.com somehow appealed to me.

And why not? Nothing else was going on and I’ve always wanted to learn more about my roots, even though I’ve gone all these years without really delving into it.

Sure, I knew there was some German in my blood. Heck, when he died, my Dad was reciting Bible verses in German learned when he went to a Lutheran kindergarten in Chicago.

And my sister did a little genealogical research and hooked up with some Swedish dairy farmers on my mother’s side.

But that was about it, other than what I learned from my high school German teacher.

As I so vividly recall, head cocked to the side, Frau Ulrich would flick her frosted blond hair behind her ear and call on me with a German accent, “Mr. Bern See,” as if my last name were two words.

She explained to me one day in class that my last name was probably derived from a lake (the German word for which is “see”) somewhere in the German Alps. I looked it up and found Lake Brienz (or the Brienz See) in the Bernese (no typo) Highlands.

When my DNA results came in, my Ancestry ethnic estimate reported that I’m 39 percent from Germanic Europe and 25 percent from Sweden. Not all that unexpected. It certainly explains why I am so fair of hair and skin, which regularly ranges from pale to red to blistered to peeling under the same summer sun.

After that, my origins are 15 percent England, Wales and northwest Europe with eight percent Norway and five percent Finland factored in.

Or as one friend responded, ”You’re the whitest dude I know.”

Then there’s four percent from the Baltics and four percent Eastern Europe/Russia, specifically Pomerania.

“You’re Pomeranian? No wonder you like dogs,” my daughter said when I shared the ancestry results with her.

Pomerania? I looked it up. It’s not the origin of the fuzzy little dogs but according to Wikipedia is the historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, split between Poland and Germany.

The Ancestry.com report also lists closest relatives (of course, they must also be people who have spit in the tube and gotten results from Ancestry).

With both my Mom and Dad being only children, growing up it was my sister and me. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. No family reunions.

So the closest relative Ancestry listed for me were fourth and fifth cousins, including the Swedish dairy folks my sister had visited.

Nearing three score and 10 now, I’m suddenly compelled to seek out my ancestry.

Haven’t been this interested since the time 25 years ago we came home to find a message on the answering machine (remember those?) that began so intriguingly with “this is Charles Bernsee ringing you up from New Zealand.” My daughters replayed that tape so often you’d have thought it was New Kids on the Block on the other end.

Turns out the caller’s great-great-grandfather was among those dispatched Down Under following some indiscretions in England. Oh great, I thought, so we have a criminal element in our family.

But that branch of the family must have withered and died since no one from New Zealand or Australia pops up on the Ancestry radar.

Too bad. Would have made for an appropriate ending to all of this …

G’day.