Ancestry

We Americans, this displaced, mutt-ish people love to tell others about our ancestral percentages--I'm 33% this and 25% that and so forth. It helps explain strange last names, different skin tones (where applicable) and give excuses for our temperament, so we think.

What's funny about it is that depending on our mood and current likes, we can appeal to whatever race or nationality we feel like at the time. Someone says, "Yesterday I was feeling dramatic and passionate, so it must be my Latin blood, but today I'm stoic and closed-minded--that's my German coming out." However, the true reason we feel passionate and grumpy, hard-headed and then fun-loving is that we are dis-integrated sinners, whose entire personality is slowly becoming undone as we slavishly follow the whims of sin and temptation. You may call it "being yourself," but yourself is often a selfish, wicked pig whose identity is being corrupted by sin. Me too. To be sure, our German-ness, Irish-ness or whatever-ness is not to blame.

Of course we can also celebrate our ancestry in a Christian manner, remembering how God brought our disparate forebears together, confirming them in their faith (or not), doing good (or not), and so on. Our past, our family, is important, and as Americans we have the nearly unique privilege of having many families, many pasts, forebears of many nationalities.

Who am I? My mother's side is 100% German...well, Jewish German on her mother's side. This was a family secret for some time. Apparently my Granmother's cousins freely admitted it, but she denied it to the grave. My mother only found out about fifteen years ago. So sometimes I like to play the "Jew Card." At the seminary I would occasionly say, "During the Exodus of my people..." or "You Gentiles are now part of Israel like me." Many found it irritating. Some of those (anglicized) family names are Lovercamp, Inselmann, Heaper, Neuhaus. Mother's father's family immigrated here before the 1860's; some of these fought on opposite sides of the American Civil War. Others fled Germany relatively later, coming only to America in the last 120 years.

My Father's side is more mixed--Anglo-Saxon and Celt: we have Hall, Thompson, and Patrick. We've got some colorful stories on this side. One Great-great uncle lived next to the James Farm in Kearney, MO. He told my grandpa stories of that trashy, good-for-nothing James family--"Frank and the Old Woman" he called them. Jesse was dead by then. Once the FBI blew up the farmhouse, the "Old Woman" moved to town. A decade or so after her death, the house changed hands and my grandmother was born in it.

Those in the St. Louis area may be interested that another Great-great Uncle was John Ravenscroft Patrick, an amatuer archeologist and alleged antiquities (grave) robber. Concerning the Cahokia Indian Mounds, Wikipedia accurately reports, "the survey made for local dentist Dr. John R. Patrick in the 1880s marked the beginning of modern understanding of the Cahokia site as a whole, and its relationship to other sites in the area."

I like to think of him as a teeth-pulling Indian Jones.