I’ve had many visitors lately and that always throws me off a bit. It’s been great. Getting thrown off is what keeps us from falling into mindless routine.

My friend from LA crashed in my room with her BF and I crashed at my friend’s fancy place downtown. His shower has 8 shower heads. So, I’m pretty fuckin clean this week.

Tonight I’m off to train like a motherfucker and then I have a whole lot of writing to do.

Did I mention I signed up for the DNA home kit? Actually two of them– I did the health one, and also the National Geographic “Genographic 2.0” one. My results from both should be back in a couple weeks and I can’t wait, I’ll be able to cross analyze the ancestry component of both and test for accuracy.

For those that I haven’t mentioned it to, here’s what led to that. Pretty interesting, actually.

I started looking into the home DNA kits now that prices have come down. As I poked around and read about them, I learned that one of them is connected to a huge web database of birth, death, marriage and baptism records, all searchable through OCR plus images of the actual handwritten record. I checked it out and signed up for the 14 day trial to see what I’d be able to find.

In that trial, I added my parents and grandparents and their siblings, and the system helped me build deeper from there. The result is that my entire pedigree has been mapped back more than half a millenia, with with earliest confirmed record to be the birth of my 14th great grandfather in 1430 in a pretty interesting part of England which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

It turns out most of what I was told about my lineage–on both sides– is wrong. Hell even my first name turns out to not even be a family name, as I was told. So either my parents or their parents are full of shit. My mom is the only one still living, and she’s just pleading ignorance so far.

Firstly, I’m not nearly as German as I was told. My mother’s grandmother came from Germany, but her mother was half, the other half being English. On my dad’s side, it’s all English, but from a particular part which at the time was called “Danelaw” because it was run by Vikings. Now the really interesting part: the Vikings who settled one section of Danelaw mostly had my last name, and it means “tough” or “hard”, but more than that, it’s from a specific part of Viking Norway which still has my goddman family name in it: Hardangerfjord.

So I’m a Norwegian Viking, directly. It explains my hair, eyes, skin and general dispositions… overly physical, prone to unnecessary intensity? (Being friendly to myself here– it’s more like overly ridiculous and prone to absurdity.)

(Though Norway is the home of Black Metal…)

A web search revealed a page about my viking family name. For those who know my family name, search for it and “viking” and you’ll probably see the page there near the top. The author of the page had his address listed, so I wrote to him. Turns out he’s professor of microbiology at Nottingham University in UK, and that he studies viking culture and has my same family name.  When I introduced myself and explained I’d recently found my lineage to Danelaw, he basically said me I need to go back to Hardangerfjord (and Hardanger generally– the province in which the fjord is located) to reunite with my ancient roots there.

So, fuck yes.

Back to my mom’s side for sec. So her dad was English, and using the same database I was able to easily go back through his pedigree as the English kept extremely good records, mostly because of the church.

I learned something pretty interesting: my 9th great grandfather on my mom’s side is Sir Richard Howard. He was born in Corby Castle:

He married Lady Margret Preston there in Corby, and later died there.

It’ll be neat to go there to check it all out. I’ll bring my tree to show the occupant and maybe I can get in and check it out.

His dad was Lord Howard, my 10th great grandfather, who was was born in and lived in another castle called Naworth:

The last English connection was the daughter of Lady Margret and Sir Richard, Mary Howard, my 8th great grandmother. She was born in Arundel castle, but didn’t stick around long.

Mary Howard is my last English connection on my mom’s side.  When she turned 24 she
headed to the new colonies. She was married in 1639 in New Haven Connecticut, and died there in 1650, and that’s the most recent link I have to England. My dad’s side came over in 1630, about ten years after the Mayflower, though his mom’s family was here before the Mayflower, in about 1614, and has been in Vermont since the 1690s– and that family name is my middle name today. My dad’s dad’s line was also a primary settler of Vermont, with records there from 1735. So I have generation after generation in Vermont, all the way up through recent times–  both my grandfather and father were born there. I lived there from age 2-4, and then across the boarder in NH for most of my childhood.

So on both sides I’m as deeply New England as a person can get. Both sides left from England, one was royalty, and the other were Vikings, coming from a Norwegian fjord with the same name as my family.

Pretty goddamn cool.

I can’t wait for my DNA tests to come back.

Out of time, catch you soon with updates.