Pretty thought-provoking stuff. Who are we? Keith wanted to learn anything he could about his family, but I had a more definite goal in mind: The consummate Anglophile, I wanted a link to Britain.
To our respective computers we retired on a recent cold and windy Saturday. On the Ancestry.com blank family tree, I typed the ancestors I knew — Dad’s Sicilian father, Mom’s German grandparents.
Grandpa Ippolito changed his name to Frank Burk when he came to America in the late 1800s. He ran Burk’s Grocery a hundred years ago in Middletown, and married a girl of German descent. I discovered her ancestors in Switzerland in the 1600s. That probably explains my penchant for chocolate (at least now I have an excuse).
Mom’s mother, Rose Wetzel, was German through and through. Rose’s grandfather, Balthazar, came to Rockport, Ind., in the mid-1800s from a town in the Black Forest. I’m entertained by the thought of being a daughter of that primeval woodland. Bonus: I actually have a relative named Balthazar. I just like how it sounds.
Balthazar’s son, Jacob, a baker, was by all reports a robust individual. After his funeral — held in the Wetzel family home in Rockport — the pallbearers, coffin and contents crashed through the porch when the wooden floorboards, literally in this case, gave up the ghost under the strain. This is stuff you don’t usually find on Ancestry.com, but it was a family legend I recalled when I ran across Jacob’s name.
His daughter, Rose, worked in her father’s bakery and could wrangle a big pan of yeasty dough into a mean loaf of bread well into her 80s.
What did all these people have in common? To my chagrin — none of them were English.
That left Mom’s father, Sidney Newton Cape, a papermaker. As a child in Coffeyville, Kansas, Gramps saw the notorious Dalton Gang “layed out on the street” after they attempted to rob the town bank.
Sidney’s parents were Charles and Jennie Cape ... and that’s where I got stuck, floundering around in the mid-1800s, not a Brit in sight. The little green “hint” leaves on my Ancestry.com family tree waved mockingly at me. I was Germanic, Sicilian ... but not Celt. No link to Shakespeare, William Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh, St. Patrick, Queen Elizabeth, Lily Langtry or even Jack the Ripper. Rats.
Disheartened, I wandered over to Keith’s corner of cyberspace and beheld a veritable forest of family trees. To make matters worse, they were all British!
The guy is so WASP-y it’s a wonder he doesn’t buzz when he walks.
Not only that — the branches of his tree were loaded with some really succulent fruit — names like William Tell Lewis and Truthful Lewis; a missionary who turned pirate; even a famous ghost, “Ocean Born Mary.”
I retired to the living room in defeat, stewing. Keith had relatives named Cary or Carey in the 1500s. Where had I heard that name? Then it hit me. Anne Boleyn, unfortunate second wife of King Henry VIII — one of the beheaded ones — had an older sister, Mary, who had also been Henry’s mistress. Mary was married to — wait for it — one William Carey. And according to contemporary reports, neither of their two children resembled Mr. Carey — if you know what I mean.
I sat up in dismay, staring over at Keith as he sprawled dozing on the couch. Could my lanky, easygoing WASP-y husband possibly be related to evil, megalomaniacal Henry, my least favorite English monarch? I was simultaneously intrigued and horrified, and spent the rest of the weekend addressing him as “Your Majesty.”
A trip to Kansas is probably in my future if I’m going to further unravel my past. In the meantime, around my husband at least, I’m going to watch my neck.
Dr. Stephanie A. Burk is a Madison Twp. veterinarian. She blogs at www.dogphysicsandotherobservations.blogspot.com.