One of the Americans in my class did a presentation today on personal DNA analysis for discovering your ancestry. Apparently the likes of ancestry.com and 23 and me are very popular over there, and at around US$150, make quite popular gifts. You pay your money, spit into a test tube and send it away, and six weeks later you can find out your ethnicity, and also if you have any relatives that have also taken a test. The Europeans in our class, including the teacher, were uniformly horrified by the idea. “Why would I do that?” They said “I know who I am!” I would have called their attitude smug except I didn’t know the word in French. They thought it was because kiwis and Americans live in relatively new countries made up of immigrants that it would matter so much to us. Maybe there’s something in that, but I do know that 10% of people don’t have the father they think they have – although is it better to remain ignorant if that’s the case? It does mean that chances are, in our class of ten plus the teacher, at least one person is calling the wrong person dad.
In any event, my latest ethnicity update from ancestry.com still gives me a mix of smug Western Europe, and (once was) Great Britain.