Ancestry Magazine

My love of genealogy is a gift from my grandmother. When, as a child, I spent weekends with her, she enthralled me with chicken and dumplings, stories of how her parents met, and the delicious tale of how we descended from Mayflower pilgrims. I roamed the cornfields by her house looking for lost graves and dreaming of meeting the people in Grandma’s stories.

As I grew older, I started collecting names and dates and places—and that’s when I learned that not all of Grandma’s stories were 100 percent true. In fact, my family was nowhere near the Mayflower.

Since then, I’ve applied rigid standards to my sources. But I’m still bewitched by a good story, even one that stretches back beyond plausible record keeping. So I was delighted recently to tap into an online genealogy for my family that crossed the Atlantic and wound its way back through Mary von Habsburg, the house of Burgundy, and the Count of Wormgau.

I told myself I should stop, but this story was irresistible. When I finally typed in Adam, I did so without conviction, knowing this would surely fail any reasonableness check my technology could offer. It didn’t, and there sat Adam in my family tree. I began to work forward, looking up Adam’s descendants, and that’s when I discovered his 23rdgreat- grandson, Dardanus. But in Greek mythology, Dardanus is the founder of Troy—and the son of Zeus and Elektra.

It’s one thing to imagine yourself related to Adam, but finding Dardanus makes me a daughter of Zeus, too. I sat back, trying to make some sense of my newfound lineage, and that’s when it hit me: genealogy isn’t just an exercise in dates and locations. These stories—real or dreamed—place me in context. I may not be Mayflower stock, but I still have reason to be proud of my heritage. Even if one of the seven Pleiades sisters isn’t really my 121st greatgrandmother.

Elaine Clark is a radio producer and amateur genealogist.