Digging into your family tree is a lot like digging in your own nose. It’s probably going to unearth something deeply unpleasant and you’re going to end up wishing you hadn’t done it.
We think it’s all going to be Cleopatra and Russian royalty and Alexander the Great. But more often than not, it’s a racist with no neck called Theophilus the Unwashed who murdered seven people with a tree branch because they prayed in a different way from him.
To be honest, I’m not really surprised that 23andMe went bankrupt. Because, based on the anecdotal report-backs from friends who have used it, the results were never what you expected — “interesting” in completely the wrong way.
One friend did not discover the glorious Nordic heritage he’d expected (he has a very full beard) but instead found out that his entire lineage came from one deeply uninteresting town in England. His ancestors had basically just been really enthusiastic about never, ever, ever leaving Armpit-upon-Thames. Ever. My girlfriend found out that a not insignificant portion of her genetic heritage was Congolese. Which, considering she’s an Afrikaans girl from the East Rand, raises some rather knotty questions about the family history (to be clear, she enjoys her Congolese genetic heritage but is slightly less enthusiastic about the colonial misadventure it possibly represents).
And this, I guess, is the bear trap of doing this kind of thing. If you’re ... ahem, “a person of European descent”, the chance of you bumping up against a deeply unsavoury ancestor within a couple of generations is almost inevitable. We can’t wish away that the history of white people is a long one of brutality, exploitation, ignorance and plunder. We’ve all got an awful industrialist or brutal landowner or unrepentant slave-owning bastard buried shallowly in our family tree’s roots. This is, of course, not limited to white people; it’s just that they scrupulously wrote it all down, so it’s all very well-documented.
And the thing is, buried “out of sight out of mind” is generally where all this discomfort would stay if it weren’t for the fact that two things are inevitable as you get older: first, an inexplicable need to look at birds and, second, becoming obsessed with exploring the family history.
My mother doesn’t much care for birds, but the “family detective” part has kicked in hard.
It all started with a trip to Scotland and the discovery that a branch of our family tree (the Pettigrews) had, at one point, been the owners of a fancy department store — the kind that literally manufactured its own china from which to sip tea in between buying a hat box. She tracked down a couple of these, and I must say it’s quite thrilling to see “Pettigrew and Stevens” stamped on the underside of a frilly side plate.
Then she discovered a picture of a great-grandmother in the National Portrait Gallery, wearing a ring that my mother still has. Fun! This quickly escalated to all the things you’d expect, like tracking down the family tartan (a very yellow-forward design which I guarantee looks good on absolutely no one), figuring out who had a scandalous affair with the ambassador from Ecuador and who married whose cousin twice-removed. All of which tracked back to finding out that a rather significant artery of our ancestral line is the McLeods from the Isle of Lewis. Better and better — this is Highlander stuff!
Well. That’s not the end of it.
Because there is another, very famous, McLeod from the Isle of Lewis (and maybe some of you have already guessed who it is): Mary Anne MacLeod — otherwise known as Donald Trump’s mom.
Y’all — the Isle of Lewis is not very big.
And for the eagle-eyed among you who’ve spotted that it’s McLeod vs MacLeod, calm down. It’s one of those things where some parts of the same family couldn’t figure out which end of the pen was the “writey bit”, and so you’ve got McLeods and Macleods all on the same family haggis-eating rollcall.
And so, doing my best internal impression of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, I have to confront the very real possibility that I am related to Donald Trump.
Suddenly a lot of things start to make an uncomfortable amount of sense.
I also have a comically gestural way of speaking.
I too have never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
I too am super shit at golf!
I recently read a book that was about Greenland!
I fall asleep in public!
Six months ago I had also never heard about the Strait of Hormuz.
… it’s been hiding there — in plain sight. All. This. Time.
Maybe this is all just a matter of perspective, less a genealogical kick in the nuts (something Mary Anne MacLeod should have done to her potential suitors to save the future from a fat headache) and more a thrilling gold-plated opportunity! A chance to make lemonade from the world’s most radioactive orange.
DJT mah chaan! Haazit BOET. Lekker to be part of the fam, fam.
I’m very excited to start wearing my ties boldly long, although admittedly I will first have to go and buy a lot of ties. Luckily blood-soaked red is very much my colour. I’m even more excited for my massively fraudulent cryptocurrency fortune to kick in, and I obviously assume that I can officially rename my Land Rover “Defender 1” and that officials from the Qatari government will soon be arriving to armour-plate it and fill it with hidden bugging devices. Naturally I’ll be invited for Christmas, and either Melania (or one of her body doubles) will lovingly make me a traditional Slovenian poprtnik.
Clearly this is so much better than being descended from some stupid Viking called Ragnar. Those idiots raped* and plundered their way across the modern world chasing ideological glory and eternity in Valhalla and not just because they got made fun of at a banquet that one time.
It’s so reassuring for my existence to finally make sense. For the engine of my life to have ignorant, rambling, bombastic, venal shape. I can breathe free and easy, content in the knowledge that the huge increase in my personal debt ceiling is actually just part of a predestined cosmic pattern in the shape of a sagging jelly homunculus.
I wonder if it’s too late to throw my hat in the ring for mayor of Joburg.
*allegedly
