I was told very early in life that I was adopted and never gave it much thought. I think at some point when I was still very young I said to my mother that I would like to search for my "real" mother and I saw from the expression on her face that I had crossed some kind of line and I never brought it up again - and put that thought out of my head. A couple of years before she died she pulled me to her beside and told me the story of how the adoption happened and that she thought my name had been Robert. I wrote that story into my song, Enfant Choisi, but still never gave it a lot of thought. Here's a link:
Then along came AncestryDNA and when they had a sale on St Patrick's Day I sent in my spit and $109. and the results are in...
Some of you Blainreaders might have noticed last month I tried to have an "office pool" of sorts to guess what is my ancestry but I guess I didn't offer an attractive enough prize because nobody took me up on it. Anyway, I made my guess just before I opened the results: "Irish," I said, and wouldn't you know I'm 61% Irish and 14% Iberian Peninsula...and for John Robshaw and anyone else who wanted to know the rest, its 11% Great Britain, 8% Europe West and 4% Italy/Greece. Not very exotic, eh? I'm about as WASP as you can get. But now the real fun begins. I've had three relatives come out of the woodwork and we think I'm a McGoldrick. More to come on all this...