My brother is a genealogy freak, and has long been obsessed with tracking down our ancestors. This has been complicated by the fact that our father was adopted. He was literally found on a doorstep in 1918, the year that the flu pandemic that killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide started, so we have assumed for some time that his parents died in that pandemic.
He was adopted by a Quaker family, but grew up fairly irreligious, and passed that along to me. So did my mother, who was a Presbyterian in name only. She tried to send me to Sunday School, but I was literally kicked out after a few weeks for asking the Sunday School teacher where the woman who supposedly married Cain in the Land of Nod came from. Anyway, my brother just got back from a field trip to Philadelphia, where he tracked down adop- tion and census records that hint that my father was the son of US-born citizens (which spoils our hopes of getting a "grandfather clause" EU nation passport), but that *their* parents were most likely from Russia, and spoke Yiddish. So cool...I'm Jewish. Oy veh. Not really, of course, since as I understand it Jewish lineage is valid only if passed down matri- linearly, but it's fun to play with a whole new concept -- being at least partly descended from Russian Jews. Mix that in with the established Scot-Irish heritage on my mother's side, and my gene pool is kinda like the result of an unlikely ménage à trois between Sean Connery and Maureen O'Hara and Golda Meir. :-)
