Happy St. Patrick's Day

Of course, today "everyone is Irish," but some of us really can trace our ancestors across the pond to Ireland. Mine beat the crowd of the famine ships of the 19th century and crossed in the 1730s, signing on to fight in the American Revolution against their hated British rulers, stopping a generation or two in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and then moving on to Tennessee, with later generations leaving Appalachia for Illinois, Texas and California as various misfortunes gave them a push to seek a better land and life. After 7 or 8 generations in the U.S., my German-English and Scots-Irish bloodlines got together in an outdoor farmhouse wedding in August 1934, and the rest is my history, as we say.

At the coffee shop I was refilling my cup and next to me was a young man with a blinking St. Pat's pin on his baseball cap (hate to see people wearing those inside). "Any Irish in your genealogy?" I asked. He said he didn't think so but wasn't sure (most 20-somethings don't know much about genealogy, so it really wasn't a fair question). "My mom's Hungarian-German, but my dad's adopted, so we don't know anything about his family." I didn't pursue that story line--after all, we are total strangers, and for all I know his parents could be divorced or deceased. But here's my opinion.

If his grandparents were willing to adopt his father, a life changing event for him over which he had no control, then it's perfectly OK for his dad to "adopt" his ancestors from his adoptive parents' genealogy. Over this he does have a choice. It's not fair that the state of Ohio still has laws hiding his father's past, but there are a few things his father does control, and that's to climb that family tree with all its roots and branches, his grandparents, great-grandparents, great-greats, cousins, nephews, nieces and so forth.