I was lucky enough to have somebody offer me one of the Ancestry test kits. I can have my DNA tested. This will hopefully show… something. I’m not sure what form or format the results will take but it should be interesting. Seemed appropriate to do the test and get it ready to send in on Father’s Day.

One of my father’s friends said he wanted to know if his twin was actually his brother based on some questionable choices the one had made. I thought that was hilarious and a fun way to approach the topic, but I am genuinely curious about genealogy. On my father’s mother’s side of the family there is apparently some connection to Col. Prescott of Revolutionary War fame. That would be the “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” guy. Defending Bunker Hill against the British with no real supplies or reinforcements. I’m not certain what the specifics of that connection are, but Prescott was my grandmother’s maiden name. I know my family has that paperwork in a file. It’s a cool story / connection. I don’t know how strong or weak that connection really is and I’m certain there’s a lot of paperwork involved in making that connection more solid.

I’m deeply interested in tracking the Hardenbrook name back. I’d really like to know more about that family line, but it comes to a sudden stop with my grandfather’s mother. From what I’ve been told she didn’t have much good to say about the man carrying the Hardenbrook name and… declined to speak further about it. EVER. Combine that with an apparent records fire somewhere along the way and I doubt there’s much of a chance to find out any real connections. Some of the difficulty of genealogy is stories being passed down by tradition without a lot of documentation to back them up. Some of the difficulty is that the people in question don’t want to talk about the past (great-grandma shut that one down) or aren’t able to any more (because they’re gone now).

There are times when I think any time machine would be used just to track down family lines. Would be a neat thing to know. I’ll settle for seeing what the results are when my DNA test comes back. Maybe there will be some kind of surprise in there!