Recently while researching the Pennsylvania Dutch culture for a class presentation I was thinking about how disconnected from my ancestral culture I am. About a year ago my daughter who is multiracial and was identifying as Other had seen the many ancestry DNA commercials on television and she wanted to know her ethnic roots. This raised some concerns for me, but we talked about it. I ordered a kit, and we sent a tube of her saliva off for analysis. We received the results back to learn of her many ethnicities and for me to learn that I must be Swedish, not Swiss as I had thought my whole life.
There must have been a misinterpretation along the line somewhere which gave my mom and I a good laugh. Although my own ethnic culture was not predominant in my family, culture was. My dad is a musician and we often had traveling musicians and diverse people camping right in our backyard. So, thinking about what culture I most identify with it wouldn’t be Swiss or Swede wouldn’t even be American, but the culture of the Hippies. It is Hippies who taught me to embrace all cultures and love all people to never resort to violence or hatred and to oppose all unjust systems. There were people of different ethnicities that raised me along with my parents, and just as many are in my daughter’s DNA. All being equally important and sacred, but the sameness was what made sharing it something special, even magical, to know the power of the universal connections in making food, singing songs and hearing each other’s stories.
(The picture above is my daughter’s ethnicity estimate from Ancestry.com)
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