Wordless Wednesday

 

My Mother and Cars

Maybe a car my mother drove?

Don't confuse the title of this post with "My Mother the Car", which was an entertaining television series starring Jerry Van Dyke (notwithstanding what later critics had to say about it).  For Mother's Day, I wanted to share the saga of my mother's love-hate relationship with cars.  Maybe it was because she grew up in major urban centers where it was not common for everyone to have a car, but my mother and cars didn't always seem to get along.

The reason my parents met is because she was in a car that broke down.  I don't know if it was my mother's car or her best friend's.  The story is that they were going to a party and the car broke down.  My mother was fretting that they'd miss the party, but her friend said, "Don't worry, I'll call my uncle.  He can fix it."  It turns out my mother's best friend was my father's niece (so she's my first cousin).  I never heard if he fixed the car, but my parents married soon after.

When I was very young, my family lived in Southern California, where cars were a necessity.  While it was possible to get around without one, it took forever to do so.  I can't imagine my mother trying to go by bus with three small children; she didn't have the patience.  She had a horrible sense of direction, however, and got lost all the time.  The amazing thing is that my brother, who was not quite 8 years old when we left California, was often the one who gave her directions to get home again.  (And just to prove that it wasn't something about driving in Los Angeles that caused her to lose her sense of direction, she even managed to get lost in Niceville, Florida, which is about as small as it sounds.)

Another memorable car breakdown my mother experienced was on the Grapevine, the twisty, turny highway that goes through the Tehachapi Mountains and is the connection between the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles area.  Apparently she and a friend (not my cousin) were driving from Los Angeles to Modesto to a party (yup, another one).  The car broke down on the Grapevine.  Rather than miss their party, my mother and her friend left the car where it was, headed to Modesto some other way, and left it to my father to retrieve the car.

Through all of this my mother had been driving automatics.  When my family moved to Australia, however, my father told her that she was going to have to learn to drive a stick, because there just weren't that many automatics in Australia, and they were extremely expensive.  So it was drive a stick, rely on public transportation, or stay at home.  That was enough to motivate my mother, but she was never great with a stick.  She definitely believed in the phrase, "If you can't find 'em, grind 'em."  (Unfortunately, I think she taught my brother to drive, and for several years he ground gears with the best of them.)

To some degree my mother recognized her limitations, and sometimes she chose not to push it.  When we were living in Florida, she had taken my siblings and me to a theme park (sorry, don't remember which one), and on the way home we experienced one of those lovely heavy Florida thunderstorms, where it's almost white-out conditions.  Rather than try to drive through the storm, my mom pulled over to the side of the highway, and we waited it out.

Perhaps the most eye-catching thing my mother did with a car was the time she hit a deer.  I don't know how common it is, but she rolled the car.  Luckily, she was fine.  My stepfather told me he drove past the rolled car on the other side of the highway and didn't realize my mother was in it.

At least she wasn't hit by lightning in a car.  That happened to her twice while she was on the phone.

Do More DNA Results Lead to Irish Ancestry?

I had two extra AncestrayDNA kits lying around.  One was left over because my aunt was unable to provide enough spit to make the test work, and I ended up getting her a Family Tree DNA test instead.  The second was unused because the person for whom I had originally intended it passed away before I was able to send it.  So I had been trying to figure out to whom to send them instead.

I remembered a recent post by Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, when she discussed the significant differences in ethnicity estimates between her DNA results and those of her siblings.  Since I've been curious about the possibility of actually having Irish ancestry (12%, as shown by my AncestrayDNA results) since I proved (through Y-DNA testing) that my grandfather was a Sellers by informal adoption, I decided to send the tests to my two full siblings.  I wanted to see if either or both of them would have Ireland appear in their ethnicity estimates.  That might lend more credibility to the possibility that my grandfather's biological father was at least part Irish, and maybe help me in my search to find him.

Now, I do realize, as Judy reminds everyone regularly, that the ethnicity estimates are really nothing more than "cocktail party conversation" (or "smoke and mirrors", as I call them), because the underlying statistics are simply not reliable and have significant margins of error.  I also know, however, that if you have double digit results, it's likely that there is at least some amount of that ethnicity in your make-up.

So I checked with my brother and sister to make sure they were willing to do the tests, registered the kits on my account, and then sent the packages off.  I waited patiently for the "processing" messages to arrive from Ancestry.com, and then again for the results.

And now they've both arrived.

AncestryDNA ethnic results for Janice M. Sellers

AncestryDNA ethnic results for my brother

AncestryDNA ethnic results for my sister

The results aren't as wildly varied as those of Judy and her siblings, particularly for the major contributors, but there are definitely differences.  We all show up as about half Jewish, just as we should, but we vary from 45% to 48% to 52%.  We all show large amounts of Europe West, ranging from 26% to 34% to 40%.

And we all show Ireland.  My brother and I show 12%, while my sister has only 2%.  A result of 2% could easily be erased by the margins of error present in these tests, but two results of 12% make me think I'm on the right trail in looking for a man with Irish origins as my great-grandfather.

Of course, now that I have these DNA results, I also plan to work with the real data, the chromosomal information, to see what else I can learn about our ancestry and to try to connect with cousins.  But I figure having one theory borne out by additional testing is a good start.

And why didn't I also test my half-sister, who shares the same father with my brother, my sister, and me?  Because her mother was all Irish all day long, and that would throw off any ability to identify Irish on my father's side of the family.  But maybe I should get her to take a test to see if she really does show up as half-Irish . . . .

Oh yeah, and I realized this is my 1,000th blog post.  Not bad for someone who still hates to write!

Wordless Wednesday