Mark Shernick

Ancestors

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Descendant of Magnus Maximus, aka Macsen Wledig, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire from 383 to 388.

Descendant of Charlemagne, aka Carolus Magnus or Charles the Great, King of Franks (768 - 814), Emperor of the Romans (800 - 814) and founder of the Carolingian Empire.

Descendant of Crinan of Dunkeld, Mormaer of Moray (975 - 1045) and Archpriest of the Sacred Kindred of St. Columba.

Descendant of Olav Haraldsson, aka St. Olaf or Olaf II (995 - 1030), a Viking King (1015 - 1028) who converted Norway to Christianity.

Descendant of Анна Киевская, aka Anne of Kiev (1030 - 1075), Princess of Chernigov and Queen of France (1051 - 1066), the wife of King Henri I.

Descendant of William The Conqueror, aka William I, Duke of Normandy, King of England from 1066 to 1087.

Descendant of Fulk V, Comte d'Anjou (1092 - 1144), King of Jerusalem from 1131 to 1143.

Descendant of Alienor of Aquitaine, who reigned as Queen of France (1137 - 1152) and Queen of England (1154 - 1189).

Descendant of Louis Capet of France, aka St. Louis, who reigned as King of France (1226 - 1270) and led the 7th Crusade (1248) and 8th Crusade (1270).

Descendant of William Ross, 3rd Earl of Ross (1248 - 1323), a supporter of The Bruce and signer of the Declaration of Arbroath.

Descendant of King Robert I, known as Robert the Bruce, who reigned as King of Scots from 1306 to 1329.

Descendant of King Edward III, Plantagenet, who reigned as King of England from 1327 to 1377.

Descendant of Sir Henry Sinclair (1345 - 1400), 1st Earl of Orkney, who allegedly discovered America 100 years before Columbus.

Descendant of King James I Stewart, who reigned as King of Scots from 1406 to 1437.

Descendant of Elizabeth Woodville (1437 - 1492), of York, known as "The White Queen," who secretly married King Edward IV about 1452 and was crowned Queen Consort of England 1464 - 1470.

Descendant of Mary Boleyn (1499 - 1543), sister of Anne Boleyn and mistress to King Henry VIII (Tudor).

Descendant of Henry Adams (1583 - 1646), a Puritan Migration founder of Braintree, Massachusetts and ancestor of U.S. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Descendant of Countess Eudoxia Rzhevskaia Chernysheva (1693 - 1747), a royal mistress to Tsar Peter the Great.

Biography

My name is Mark. I am a writer and amateur photographer who used to haunt the streets of Colorado Springs, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Denver. I now live in Kansas City (go Royals!)

My Life (Short Version)

The general arc of my life through time is simple enough: Born in Nebraska, I grew up in Colorado Springs in the 1960s, attended the Fountain Valley School of Colorado (a private preparatory school) during the 1970s, then completed college at Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 1983 with a B.A. in English Literature.

I began banging away at a writing career between 1985 and 1990 while living in the Twin Cities and attending the University of Minnesota's school of journalism.

Most of the 1990s I spent paying back student loans by working for the postal service, typing zip codes. So much for becoming a great writer.

My brother Chris thoughtfully clipped an article from the Sunday supplement that listed my job as one of the 10 most boring jobs on Earth.

With the exception of a trip to London in 1996, I haven't done much travelling. While in London, I made a point of visiting the grave of T.S. Eliot, at Westminster Abbey, and recited one of his poems by heart.

"Lady of silences, calm and distressed, torn and most whole . . . ."

I noticed there weren't very many graves devoted to zip code typists.

I've dated, but never married.

In 1997 I moved to Seattle to help support my mom, who was struggling with health issues.

When I went to work one night, I was surprised to find a burly and bearded mailhandler in tears, crying like a baby and saying his girlfriend had just died. That's how I first learned about the death of Princess Diana.

My mother managed to outlive the Princess.

When she passed away in 2006, I moved from Seattle to Denver, and spent some time working in the admissions department of the University of Colorado's Denver campus.

Then 45 years old, I was very impressed by some of the brilliant admissions essays being written by millenial high school students, and vowed that when I grew up I wanted to be just like them.

I survived the great pandemic of 2020 by working overtime at Amazon.com, and I moved to Kansas City in 2022, when it was finally safe to travel again.

KC is my family's old stomping grounds: I have plenty of aunts, uncles and cousins out here.

As I now approach retirement age, I look back on my life and see that there is some real truth to the old saying that "life is what happens while you are making other plans." My life has really flown by, far too quickly!

As one of my old professors at Carleton loved to say: "Life is like the game of baseball. By the time you learn how the game is played, you got no more knees, and you can't run the bases."

When I try to make sense of it all, I find myself doing what many old folks do: Family History. It helps me to understand my own fate better when I put my small life into contrast with the much larger sweep of human history.

I now understand many things that I didn't understand back in high school:

• I know why F. Scott Fitzgerald said "The rich are different from you and I."
• I understand why Hemingway had no patience for such crap and punched Fitzgerald in the mouth.
• I also understand why Gatsby stood for hours at night, watching one small light across the bay.
• I understand why Peggy Mitchell called her book "Gone with the Wind" and why it was so damned long. "Boom! And the war was over" just doesn't work.
• I understand why PowerPoint reduces everything to bullet lists, and,
• Finally, I understand what Raymond Chandler meant when he said "What happened next I dunno, on account of I don't see too good when my eyeballs are scorched."

My Life (Long Version)

Below, you will find a very long biography (pardon my narcissism) that is still a work in progress. I've tried to break it into bite-sized chapters, have included the story of a college romance that went wrong yet oh-so-right (I still love her!), and have added lots of links to some of my favorite books and music -- the colorful soundtrack of my life, hidden like Easter Eggs throughout.

This section is meant for casual browsing and for fun. Again, my life is like a game of whack-a-mole (seems like it's never done), so If you want to zoom through and just click on the music or movie links that look interesting, go right ahead.

My other links, which cover why I love WikiTree and explain how to use applications in the WikiTree toolkit may be found by using the back arrow.

And now, your flawed narrator welcomes you (Hi!) and invites you to climb aboard his golf cart and join him for a brief tour of his Mad Existence.

My Family Tree: An Overview

My family tree is Ukrainian, Scots-Irish, French Alsatian and English.

• The family of my paternal grandfather, Albert Shernick, migrated from Alexandrovsk (Zaporizhzhia), Ukraine to New York in 1914. Although half Jewish, and strongly allied to some of the most powerful Jewish bagel-munchers in Europe, they also claim to be closely related to the Russian Imperial family and the ancient Ukrainian Princes of Chernigov. We take our bagels with vodka, neat. And, oy, what we would give in Kansas City for a genuine New York knish!
• The family of my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw, is Scots-Irish. She descends from the lowland clan of Schaw, in the region of Greenock, Scotland. The Scots-Irish Shaws fought in the Battle of the Boyne and settled in Antrim and Ulster, Ireland before migrating to Canada and upstate New York. During the American Revolution, they were a bunch of damned Loyalists. But they got better. After reading Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, they converted and became leaders of the fighting Irish who rebelled against British rule in 1798. Which means they got their butts kicked back to Canada.
• The family of my maternal grandfather, Lawrence Michael Gabriel, are from the region of Riedselz, in Alsace-Lorraine. They migrated to Ukraine and lived near Odessa for most of the 19th Century. They lived in Kleinliebenthal and Marienthal, two German-speaking colonies near Odessa, arriving at New York in 1887 before migrating to Texas, Missouri and Kansas.
• The family of my maternal grandmother, Bernice Libel, were Pennsy Deutsch, German and Irish Quakers who settled in Elk County, Pennsylvania, and followed the Oregon Trail westward to St. Joseph, MO. They intermarried with the Smiths of West Virginia, a line of American Patriots who can trace their lineage way back to the first families of Virginia.

Put it all together, and you could say that I am half Ukrainian, but I have a very strong claim to membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, and a direct line back to Russian, Ukrainian, English, Scottish, Irish and French royalty.

In short, if you go back far enough, we are a Grail family. If you go back even further, we had no surnames at all. As Prince Philip (an Oldenburg who was forced by British politics to use his wife, Queen Elizabeth II's surname, Windsor) used to say, "I'm just a bloody amoeba!"

The Cry of the Turtle

“The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard across our land.” Song of Solomon 2:12

Did you know that sea turtles have been around since the age of the dinosaurs? They may be dinky, but they managed to survive the Great Flood.

It just required a little wallowing in the mud, for, oh, about a millenium or two.

Well, these days when one can self-identify as anything one wants to be, I self-identify as a sea turtle. We dinky dinosaurs have a long, time-honored history, but we get no respect from WikiTree, which only covers the part where we incarnated as humans, from, oh, about 1 A.D. forward.

So I am skipping all the really fun stuff about my family of fourth-dimensional space-reptilians v. the dinosaurs, to the part about swords and sorcery during the Dark Ages.

If one goes back as far as the dark ages and the legends of King Arthur, then both sides of my family descend from royalty and from what one might call "Grail Families."

My Descent from Magnus Maximus (An Arthurian Lineage)

Believe it or not, with Wikitree you could potentially trace your family all the way back to the family of the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius (212 - 270 A.D.) or Claudius via his legendary daughter Genuissa (15 - 50 A.D.) who married to the British King Arviragus (a candidate for King Arthur).

Because "proving" any lineage this old is nearly impossible, it belongs to the mists of Avalon and the realms of fantasy genealogy. But still, it illustrates how far back one can go with WikiTree.

Here, for the record, is my notional descent from Magnus Maximus, the Roman Emperor of the west who usurped the throne from Gratian and became the last Roman Emperor to rule over Britain.

It was the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain that kicked off the Dark Ages and many local wars for control of Britain. For those unfamiliar with the wonderful historical fiction novels of Mary Stewart (1916 - 2014), Jack Whyte (1940 - 2021) and Stephen Lawhead, most of them begin by tracing King Arthur's family tree back to Magnus Maximus.

Why do they trace King Arthur to Magnus? Because the Emperor's family tree descends into the royal line of ancient Welsh Kings. There are several candidates for the Historical King Arthur, but the Welsh Kings have the strongest street cred. The Kings of Wales and Glamorgan have very ancient genealogies tracing their lines back to the Roman Emperors.

This is precisely why the Tudors (who claimed Welsh descent all the way back to Magnus) claimed to be semi-divine rulers of Britain. They, as heads of the Church of England, claimed to precede the Roman Catholic Church in Roman seniority, largely on the basis of this extremely long line of descent from King Arthur and Britain's most ancient royal family, the family of Roman emperor Magnus Maximus.

My own descent from Magnus shares many of the same names. It is interesting to note that WikiTree's Relationship Finder Tool says I have 28,165 different paths back to Magnus Maximus.

That is not because I am a Welsh saint from the planet Tralfamador. That is simply the number of lines that any human Earthling of this generation would have back to Magnus, based on mathematics alone.

Do you see why it is a bit ludicrous that the Tudors are claiming to be so special? ANYONE of English ancestry who has the computing crunch power to build their family tree completely will eventually find more than 20,000 paths back to Magnus Maximus.

Here is one of my lines of descent:

43rd great grandson (A Bit Uncertain)

• 1. Mark is the son of [private mother]
• 2. [Private] is the daughter of Lawrence Gabriel Sr.
• 3. Lawrence is the son of Sylvia Irene (Ulrich) Gabriel (1889-1979)
• 4. Sylvia is the daughter of Martha Jane (Brown) Ulrich (1848-1908)
• 5. Martha is the daughter of Absalom Brown (1824-1863)
• 6. Absalom is the son of Elizabeth (Cunningham) Brown (1798-1866) [unknown confidence]
• 7. Elizabeth is the daughter of Nathaniel F. Cunningham (1754-1832) [unknown confidence]
• 8. Nathaniel is the son of Alexander Cunningham (abt.1715-1778)
• 9. Alexander is the son of Alexander Cunningham (1650-1749)
• 10. Alexander is the son of Nehemiah Cunningham (abt.1618-1690)
• 11. Nehemiah is the son of William Cunningham (abt.1590-1641)
• 12. William is the son of Joseph Cunningham (abt.1568-abt.1637)
• 13. Joseph is the son of Sarah Wallace (1531-1602)
• 14. Sarah is the daughter of Margaret Sophia (Kennedy) Kennedy Countess of Cassilis (1517-1597)
• 15. Margaret is the daughter of Mariot (Dunbar) Kennedy (bef.1491-)
• 16. Mariot is the daughter of John Dunbar (1448-1503)
• 17. John is the son of Isobel (Sutherland) Sutherland Lady Westfield (abt.1430-1505)
• 18. Isobel is the daughter of Alexander (Sutherland) Sutherland IIIrd of Duffus (abt.1400-abt.1484)
• 19. Alexander is the son of Henry (Sutherland) Sutherland of Torboll (1351-abt.1434)
• 20. Henry is the son of Nicholas (Sutherland) Sutherland of Forbat and Duffus (1314-1363)
• 21. Nicholas is the son of Margaret (Mar) Mar Countess of Sutherland (1272-abt.1326)
• 22. Margaret is the daughter of Helen ferch Llywelyn (abt.1230-aft.1295)
• 23. Helen is the daughter of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (1173-1240)
• 24. Llywelyn is the son of Iorwerth ab Owain (abt.1130-1174)
• 25. Iorwerth is the son of Owain ap Gruffydd (abt.1100-1170)
• 26. Owain is the son of Gruffudd ap Cynan (abt.1055-1137)
• 27. Gruffudd is the son of Cynan ab Iago (bef.1019-abt.1060)
• 28. Cynan is the son of Afandreg ferch Gwair (0974-1053)
• 29. Afandreg is the daughter of Gwair ap Pyll (abt.0949-0985)
• 30. Gwair is the son of Pyll ap Cynwrig (0930-)
• 31. Pyll is the son of Cynwrig ap Cynddelw (abt.0915-)
• 32. Cynwrig is the son of Cynddelw Gam ab Elgudy (0880-)
• 33. Cynddelw is the son of Elgudy ap Gwrysnad (abt.0810-)
• 34. Elgudy is the son of Gwrsnad ap Dwywg (abt.0760-)
• 35. Gwrsnad is the son of Dwywg ap Tegog (abt.0718-)
• 36. Dwywg is the son of Tegog ap Dwyfnerth (abt.0700-)
• 37. Tegog is the son of Dwyfnerth ap Madog (abt.0675-)
• 38. Dwyfnerth ap is the son of Madog ap Mechydd
• 39. Madog ap is the son of Mechydd ap Sandde
• 40. Mechydd ap is the son of Sandde ap (Llywarch) Llywarch Hen (abt.0540-)
• 41. Sandde ap is the son of Llywarch Hen ab Elidyr (abt.0534-0593)
• 42. Llywarch Hen is the son of Gwawr ferch Brychan (0480-0534)
• 43. Gwawr is the daughter of Prawst ferch Tudwal (abt.0415-)
• 44. Prawst is the daughter of Gratianna ferch Macsen (0367-)
• 45. Gratianna is the daughter of Magnus Maximus Augustus (abt.0335-0388)

This makes Magnus the 43rd great grandfather of Mark Shernick. Yet for some reason, Mark can't get priority seating at popular restaurants in Kansas City. He has to wait to be seated, like everyone else.

Why is that? Sheesh!

Maids of Destiny: The Princesses of Chernigov

People don't realize this but Europe's fate may have been sealed already by three Princesses of Chernigov, the Dark Age daughters of Yaroslav The Wise (978 - 1054). These three weird sisters played a skeleton key role in the fate of Europe almost a thousand years ago, when they intermarried with the royal houses of Norway, Hungary and France:

Princess Elisiv of Kiev married to the famous Viking KIng Harald Hardrada of Norway. She's a root ancestor for the royal family of Norway.

Princess Anastasia of Kiev became a Queen of Hungary. She's a root ancestor for the Plantagenet dynasty of England, and a legendary forebear of King Edward I, known as "Longshanks."

Princess Anne of Kiev married to King Henry I of France and became a root ancestor of the French Capetian Dynasty -- the French family who later launched the First Crusade and sought the Holy Grail.

There is also a legend that traces Agatha, the mother of St. Margaret of Scotland back to Yaroslav the Wise, Prince of Chernigov, but this has not been confirmed. See Agatha Unknown's story here -- it is actually one of the most famous puzzles of Medieval genealogy -- one that might be solved with help from my DNA.

Because the Princes of Chernigov lived on the Black Sea, not far from the Holy Land, they have a very credible claim of descent from one of the lost tribes of Israel -- the Scythians, from whom the Scottish nation takes its name.

Ancient Scottish legends, which were very popular at the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, claimed that the House of Stuart in Scotland descends from these Scythian "sky kings" of ancient Ukraine. Scotland certainly shares the same patron saint as Ukraine: St. Andrew the Apostle, who traveled to Ukraine and Christianized the region of the Black Sea.

It is to this ancient legend of Scythia and St. Andrew that the Princes of Chernigov, Ukraine trace their own line. They clearly claim affiliation with the Gaelic nations of Ireland, Scotland and France, in addition to a bloodline that's interwoven with the royal families in Norway, Hungary, and France.

For more background on these legends, shrouded in the mist of time, see the Wikipedia summaries of the legends of Queen Scota and Gaedhil Glas. It's from this legend that my father's father, Gedalia, took his name.

My main point here is that Yaroslav the Wise and the three princesses of Chernigov are at the heart of a little-known Ukrainian branch of the Grail Family -- one that interlocks with the ancient royal families of Ireland, Scotland and Britain.

Both of my parents descend (through their maternal lines) from Princess Anne of Kiev (1036 - 1075). In other words, I am a direct descendant from this same obscure Grail Family of Chernigov and Kiev.

My direct descent from Anne of Kiev is surprisingly strong: WikiTree says I have more than 4,000 lines leading back to her. That's because I have dozens of ancestors from the House of Stuart -- as does King Charles of England.

Puts an interesting spin on the present mess in Ukraine, does it not? Seems to be far away, but in terms of genealogy, it is very near to home. Many of the wealthiest families in western Europe are descendants of these same Ukrainian Princes of Chernigov, the ancient ancestors of my grandfather, Albert Shernick.

While my grandfather's paper-trail pedigree remains a puzzle, our Y-DNA test kits have confirmed that we came from the region of Chernigov. Hence I can confirm with 100 percent confidence that the name Shernick, morphed from Chernigov.

The Shernick Family Mystery

My father's Shernick family tree, like Ukraine itself, is a mess at the moment, thanks to some Russian bastards. We descend from an ancient line of Ukrainian nobility, the Princes of Chernigov. But we descend from these ancient princes via the Russian Count Grigory Petrovich Chernyshev (1672 - 1745), a Ukrainian officer who chose to defend Ukraine from a Swedish invasion by serving in the Russian army of Tsar Peter the Great during the Great Northern War.

Count Grigory Petrovich Chernyshev fought in several significant battles during the Great Northern War, which successfully staved off an invasion by Sweden, Germany and the Baltic states but then brought the territory of Ukraine under Russian protection and control.

Count Chernyshev's brilliant military career included participation in the following key engagements:

The Azov Campaigns (1695 - 1696): As a young officer, Chernyshev took part in these campaigns against the Crimean and Turkish forces, battles which were led by Tsar Peter the Great.

The Capture of Narva (1700): Chernyshev distinguished himself during the capture of Narva, which was an early battle in the Great Northern War.

The Battle of Poltava (1709): This was a decisive battle where Chernyshev’s actions contributed to the Russian victory against the Swedish forces stationed in Ukraine.

The Siege and Capture of Vyborg (1710): Chernyshev commanded a detachment during the siege, and his assistance to Tsar Peter the Great at Vyborg made him a favorite of the Tsar.

How did the Tsar thank him? Tsar Peter reportedly "ennobled" Captain Chernyshev's Jewish family by taking the captain's wife, Eudoxia, as the Tsar's own mistress. She reportedly gave the Tsar several children, and it was impossible to tell which sons were those of the Tsar and which sons were those of Captain Chernyshev.

As a result, the Chernyshev family were given special respect and favor at the Russian court, and Gregory's sons were rapidly promoted to key posts within the Russian military service.

Bottom line: It is possible my family descend from the illegitimate offspring of Tsar Peter the Great. Our paper trail certainly leads back to the counts Chernyshev. Y-DNA testing also points in that direction.

The Chernyshev Bastards Become Jewish Sugar Daddies

My father's family descend from Russian and Ukrainian royalty, and I am fascinated by all things Romanov. The family legends left behind by my grandfather's sister are a real puzzle, but if I have read the tea leaves correctly then we descend from the Russian Counts Chernyshev (Czernichow) of Mogilev, who in turn descend from a huge and ancient Ukrainian dynasty, the Princes of Chernigov.

The Counts Chernyshev appear to be royal bastards in every sense of that word. They descend from Capt. Gregory Petrovich Chernyshev (1649 - 1745) who allowed his wife, Eudoxia, to become the mistress of Tsar Peter the Great. For his amazing ability to play Solitaire and stare off into space very patiently and quietly whilst ignoring shrieks of laughter and bumping sounds from the next room, he was rewarded with the rank of General.

As a direct result of this affair, it was often rumored that the sons of General Chernyshev were actually the offspring of the Tsar. Peter certainly showed them enormous favor, says historian Robert Massie, and from a very young age (the age of 3) they were automatically enlisted in elite Guard units.

In the Shernick family group photo, taken about 1903, you will see my grandfather as a child of 4, and you will notice that one of his older brothers, on the left, Jacob, is wearing a Tsarist uniform. Through careful image matching, we have determined that Jacob is wearing the uniform of a cornet in the 1st Life Guards Rifle Regiment, a unit once commanded (in the 1880s) by Duke Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg (1844 - 1932).

It was not possible for one to join such an elite Guard unit without the recommendation of a Russian general and proof that one has been a member of the Tsarist nobility for at least three generations. Descent from the Counts von Zarnekau or the Counts Chernyshev would certainly qualify our family to join the Guard, and when my grandfather Albert Shernick jumped off the boat at Ellis Island in July of 1914, he was listed under the name Czernichow -- an English spelling that equates very nicely with the sound-values of the name Чернышевъ in Russian.

Whether my last name ought to be Romanov is a good question. Our Y-DNA tests prove that my father and I are from the same haplogroup as Tsar Nicholas II. But we are not an exact match.

Count Gregory Chernyshev's brothers and sons were given estates at Mogilev, in the country now called Belarus. They engaged in many love affairs of their own and several "morganatic" marriages. That is, they took a fancy to the Jewish serving-women employed on their estates, became entangled in their dark, silken tresses, and became lost in their smiling eyes.

You know the rest. It's a story once told by C.S. Lewis in his book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, involving an addictive candy called Turkish Delight.

My family are the result.

The Chernyshevs were considered noble but "Jewish" by other members of the Russian nobility and kept at arm's length. Together with the family Davydov, they were one of the few Jewish families given noble rank in Russia during the 19th century.

You couldn't ignore the wealthy and entitled branch of the snobby Orthodox Chernyshev family, the Chernyshev majorat, because they owned lands and they were boo-yah rich.

But their younger Jewish cousins, the cadet branches or morganatic branches of the Chernyshev dynasty, were a very different matter.

As Jews the "down market" Chernyshevs and Czernichowskys were forbidden to own land, and they therefore specialized in respectable trades like banking, accounting, estate management and stock trading. Some branched out into making luxury goods: Fancy hats, dresses, furs, jewels, sparkling wines, fantastic pastry productions or the design and construction of luxury houses and yachts.

They would often get their jobs and their commissions on the estates of their wealthy Orthodox cousins, and intermarry with other wealthy Jewish-Russian families. In fact anyone who has watched the PBS series Downton Abbey can picture the small-town life enjoyed (and suffered) by lower-class people living during the 18th and 19th centuries on a huge, luxurious and wealthy landed estate in Russia.

It wasn't terribly different from living in a Scottish castle of the middle ages: You either farmed, did baking, polished the silver, worked in the laundry, toiled in a workshop as a cobbler, smith or harness maker, or, if you were favored, worked as a skilled jeweler or seamstress under the watchful eyes of the master and mistress themselves.

As the members of a clan or dynasty, you often had no surname, only a first name, and the Jewish serfs on a Russian estate were definitely expected to stay and marry into their own, socially circumscribed community.

During the industrial revolution of the 19th Century, these Russian-Jewish communities gained greater and greater independence, and they gradually morphed into industrial powerhouses.

Specifically, my father's Jewish branch of the Chernyshev family intermarried with the Gunzburgs (railroads), the Savranskys (diamonds and jewelry), the Himmelfarbs (glass manufacturing) and the Gutmans (banking).

The Chernyshevs are also very strongly associated with the Czarnikow family in Berlin (sugar and sugar trading) and the Schernikau family of Salzwedel, Germany, who were the official hofconditeurs or royal bakers and candy-makers to the Prussian royal family.

The Schernikow family of Salzwedel ran luxury bakery shops all over Europe: In Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna and St. Petersburg.

I descend, quite literally, from a family of Russian bastards who became Jewish sugar daddies.

Unfortunately, the very same industrial revolution produced a great deal of urban blight, a large number of ghettos and slums. The younger sons of the younger sons were simply pushed into manual labor, and if they became injured by a threshing machine, or wounded while serving in the army, they were brutally cast aside to die.

Imagine a guy named Wheeliam Vonka Romanovsky-Czernichowsky who hates his life working in the sugar-beet fields of Vohynia all day, getting drunk on a Saturday night and staring really hard at a poster for steamships to America, and that's basically the story of my family's immigration right there.

The beet fields of Volhynia made Nebraska look cool.

To Meyer Lansky and a lot of the other Jewish thugs living in the slums of Grodno or the muddy streets of Podunsky, Ukraine, the escape plan was very simple. You rob the harbor master's office, kill the old man at the ticket booth, take his money, buy a ticket to America, get on the boat with a trunk full of white powder, and sell candy on the streets of New York -- or Nebraska.

Oh. And along the way you should change your name.

How was this not a good plan?

Shernick Family Photo Mysteries

The photographic record of my strange Shernick family is a puzzle. Our family seems to be entangled somehow with the Dukes of Oldenburg and their cousins, the Counts von Zarnekau.

In a 1903 group photographs of my grandfather's family, one of his older "brothers" is wearing a uniform of the Tsar's Life Guard, and he bears a striking resemblance to Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg (1868 - 1924), who married to Olga Romanov, the sister of Tsar Nicholas II . The older brother we are calling "Mark" bears a strong resemblance to Peter Petrovich Durnovo (1883 - 1945), a friend of Duke Peter and a member of the Tsar's Okhrana or secret police.

My grandfather's sister Ida Shernick Altsitzer, photographed in 1903, bears a strong resemblance to Countess Ekaterina von Zarnekau (1884 - 1963), who was a cousin to Duke Peter of Oldenburg, because the counts and countessas von Zarnekau were the children of Duke Constantine Petrovich of Oldenburg (1850 - 1906).

My grandfather's mother, Bluma Schernick, bears a facial resemblance to Duke Constantine's wife, Agrippina Djaparidze, the first Countess von Zarnekau, who allegedly died at Kislovodsk in 1922. Bluma and Agrippina both wore their hair the same way.

All of this photo matching suggests that I may have traced the Shernick family incorrectly, and we may in fact be descendants of the Counts von Zarnekau. My grandfather's sister certainly claimed that the family once lived in Tiflis, Georgia, a city where the Counts von Zarnekau once lived.

Why would they change their names or arrive in America illegally under false names? Why hide a noble lineage?

Well, they were very clearly connected to the Tsar's security services, and if you read the story of the 1904 Nakachidze Affair, you will discover three small but very good reasons why they might want to change their names and cover up.

Either way, we seem to be related to the Russian Imperial family, and there is no denying the fact that Jacob Shernick, one of the "brothers" in my grandfather's 1903 family group photo, is wearing the uniform of an unterofficer in a Life Guard Rifle Regiment.

How to explain this photo has left us stumped.

Shernick Family Y-DNA Matching

To actually prove our lineage, we hope to use WikiTree to do some important DNA matching. Our Y-DNA tests indicate clearly that we come from an Ashkenazic Jewish family whose main clusters center on the Ukrainian city of Chernigov.

This group of Czernichows from Chernigov seems to have migrated westward to Mogilev and Grodno, in Belarus. Because Count Zakhary Chernyshev (1722 - 1784) served as the first Russian governor of Mogilev between 1773 and 1783, owned large estates there, and bears a strong facial resemblance to my family, I am going to stick with the Chernyshev tree.

We have certainly found a strong Y-DNA match with one of the Jewish Czernichowsky families who later settled near New Haven, Connecticut, They also come from Mogilev.

While I would love to compare Y-DNA with descendants of the Counts von Zarnekau, the matching that has been done with the R1b Jewish Y-DNA spreadsheet at FamilyTree makes it very clear that we are Czernichows or Czernichowskys from Mogilew.

How do we explain the odd presence of men from a Jewish family in the Tsar's Life Guard units?

Best guess: Count Zakhary Chernyshev had an unhappy marriage and liked to spend his weekends playing whist with the Jewish parlor maids employed on his estates.

The Czernichowsky offspring of this Orthodox-Jewish Mogilev love fest later served as trustworthy estate managers for several noble Orthodox families in Russia, including the Counts von Zarnekau.

Also, if one looks at my pedigree, the Rawsky or Rhezhevskaia family clearly intermarried with the family of Baron Joseph de Gunzburg (1812 - 1878), an extremely wealthy railroad baron, who single handedly engineered and financed the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

With bankers and sugar-daddies like that in the family tree, the Chernyshevs had no problem getting an officer's monkey suit to wear.

A Wee Bit Irish: My Granny Shaw's Family

Now when it comes to tracing one's family tree all the way back to the year 1 B.C., it never hurts to be Irish. They got around.

My father's mother, Mildred (Shaw) Shernick was a Scotch-Irish girl from upstate New York. Her dark eyes, freckled nose and cheerful Irish disposition were a knock-out combination from which no Russian male could easily escape.

My grandfather took one look at her, and he was more deeply sunk than the entire Russian Far East fleet off the coast of Port Arthur in 1904.

She was one of those rare, dark-tressed Edwardian beauties that so often captured the imagination of 19th-century painters like John Singer Sargent. When I once whistled over an old photo of her at age 20, she just smiled with amusement and said (in her best Betty Boop voice) "Yeah. I had a nice set o' gams!"

Midge always claimed that her Shaws from New York and Ontario were related to the Shaws of County Kilkenny and Dublin, Ireland, the family of the famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950).

Tracing her tree to the Ontario Shaws left me stunned. Granny told the truth! We are indeed related to George Bernard Shaw (he is my second cousin, five times removed). But Granny told only half the truth. Her Shaws of Ontario were a passel of United Empire Loyalists, officers of the Queen's Rangers who fought for King and Country against George Washington during the American Revolution.

This helps explain how they got their royalist butts kicked all the way to Canada, and why my granny was never invited back to tea by the DAR.

The way my Loyalist kin snuck back across the border into the United States also explains what is still going on in Europe and Ukraine: Royalists and Loyalists are like a next-door neighbor's pesky dogs. They are always barking and sticking their noses where they don't belong. You have to keep a sharp eye on them, or they will tunnel under the sturdy fence between your yards, and get into your flower bed.

Just look at what is going on along the border of Ukraine.

We still have the same three royal families who duked it out in World War I (the royal families of England, Germany and Russia) pushing their noses under the fence of Ukraine, digging up the dirt. and making serious trouble for the entire neighborhood.

I have no doubt they have all read their Machiavelli, and they are stubbornly trying to put their own favorite branch of royalty back into power: Not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia, Germany, England and the United States, not to mention Jerusalem.

My granny's Scotch-Irish family snuck back across the Canadian border about 1840, to work on the Erie Canal, and they settled quietly on farms. They've been gardening, raising chickens and rabbits, and keeping a low profile ever since. Pretty terse when it comes to family history.

They look like humble pie. But don't let that fool you.

Get them into their cups, and they will eventually suggest, with a wink, that they might be related to Mary, Queen of Scots. The Shaws of Greenock and Sauchie, Scotland, were once the Master Masons who built houses and castles for Scotland's royal family, the Stuarts.

The way the White Russians of Manhattan are still reliving the fall of the Romanovs, my granny's Irish Scots in upstate New York are still dreaming of the Rising of 1715 and the Rising of 1745 -- and still yearning for Bonnie Prince Charlie to come over the water.

Whenever I paid a visit to my Grannie Shernick, she would sit me down and we would look through her photo albums. She told amusing stories about the little rascals in her childhood photos, which were filled with flappers and Model T cars, and I felt like a little kid pressing his nose against the front window of her family home, watching the daily lives of all the pixielated people in her small hometown, Lockport, New York. I could see them so clearly, yet they lived 100 years ago. I thought: "I want to write this down!"

Mom and the Merovingians: My Mother's Family Tree

By comparison to my father's family tree, my mother's family tree is crystal clear: Her family were humble French Alsatians farmers who lived in Ukraine for a century before migrating to Texas, Kansas and Missouri in the 19th Century.

Two or three American branches of her maternal family tree descend from Virginia Cavaliers who fought on the side of the Stuart family during the English Civil War.

We can now proudly trace her family tree back to the Stuarts and Sinclairs of ancient Scotland and to more than a dozen soldiers who fought as patriots in the American Revolution.

My mother's family tree on WikiTree speaks for itself. If you go to the WikiTree profile for my maternal grandfather, Lawrence Michael Gabriel Sr. (1911 -2003), you will find a list of 11 Signers of the Magna Carta from whom Buddy descends.

Buddy was a gas station mechanic and a school bus driver, living in small-town Kansas, but his tree can be traced to 11 signers of the Magna Carta. What is wrong with this picture?

Beneath that amazing list you will find another list: Five ancestors who fought in the American Revolution. Get the picture? He is supposedly Ukrainian, yet he qualifies to be a Son of the American Revolution, times five.

Click on his ancestors button and you will get his German-French pedigree neatly documented all the way back to Michael Gabriel (b. 1800) of Riedseltz, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France.

These German-speaking Friench peasants! They documented their lineage very carefully, as if it really mattered.

What is wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing. Except the record lands them right smack in the middle of Alsace-Lorraine, a section of eastern France made famous amongst genealogists by the 1982 best-seller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

The book argues that the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and in particular the Dukes of Lorraine, claimed descent from the House of David, the holy bloodline of Jesus Christ.

Put simply: The Gabriels of Alsace are probably a Grail family. Their line in Alsace disappears into the night and fog about 1733.

We are continuing to pursue that lineage. One tantalizing lead: There was also a Gabriel family living in Paris during the reign of King Louis XIV. They were architects.

Like the Schaws of Sauchie, who built royal palaces for the Stuart family during the same time period, the Gabriel family were busily working as architects in Paris.

They were working on little projects like, oh, The Palace of Versailles.

Between 1667 and 1782, the Gabriel family served as the First Architects to the King. To quote the Palace of Versailles website:

"Between 1735 and 1775, construction work on Versailles was directed by Gabriel père et fils, father and son. Jacques (1667-1742), the father, was responsible for the grand Rococo decoration, while Ange Jacques (1698-1782), his son, built the Royal Opera House and the Petit Trianon."

There are masons. And then, there are masons.

Fast Forward Through the 19th Century

Fast forward through the 19th Century, and you will find Tsarist Russia, very strangely, playing the role of a long-term ally and business partner of the United States.

During the Crimean War of the 1850s, American officers travelled to Europe and Russia to observe cavalry tactics, and vice versa. During the 1860s, many officers of the Russian Tsars travelled to United States to observe battlefield operations during our civil war.

The relations between Russia and the United States were very warm and cordial back then. For example, one of the granddaughters President Ulysses S. Grant married to a Russian count and became the Princess Julia Grant Catacuzene (1876 - 1975). Whenever American fat cats paid a visit to St. Petersburg, they could stop in to visit with Julia.

Both countries became obsessed with railroads and steamships, and the "slavery problem" -- what to do with all the serfs. They also established some very old ties when it came to shipping lumber, grain, coal, farming equipment and luxury goods like furs, art and diamonds.

Because the American Civil War and the repeal of slavery knocked many of the sugar plantations in Cuba and Louisiana out of commission, a new industry grew up in Ukraine: The artificial manufacture of sugar by planting and harvesting sugar beets.

Many of my mother's German-speaking Ukrainian family who moved to America from 1880 forward were skilled farmers who specialized in planting and harvesting sugar beets, a highly lucrative cash crop.

Many of my father's Ukrainian family were clever Jewish workers hell-bent on getting a science degree and putting slave-owners in the United States out of work by perfecting the chemical process for extracting sugar from beets, and by fully automating the beet harvesting process.

My father's clever Jewish family not only succeeded in putting American slave owners out of work, they also succeeded in putting my mom's German-speaking farm-laborers out of work, which is why German speaking farmers began to leave Ukraine: To find work in the United States.

Come to think of it, perhaps my father's family were not so clever after all. They certainly aggravated a lot of their German neighbors, and many business leaders on Wall Street too.

The advent of automobiles, tractors, biplanes, Zeppelins, tanks and machine guns, an entirely new generation of weaponry, and two World Wars changed all of that peaceful trade with Russia. The Russians and Ukrainians became major competitors with U.S. farmers.

When my grandfather Albert Shernick arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Czar in 1914, he arrived on the winds of war. His Jewish family had learned a bitter lesson that the people of Ukraine are still learning today:

The only way to win a war with a bunch of pushy Germans from Berlin and Vienna who want to invade Ukraine and dominate the Ukrainian market is to get the hell out of Ukraine.

If at all possible, move to America. Get yourself a small house and a garden and a sweet wife. Raise rabbits and chickens. Paint pictures. Raise children.

In the words of the poet William Carlos Williams: "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."

Live in peace. Be the chicken!

Teach your children to chicken out and avoid wars. To paraphrase Sun Tzu and The Art of War, the best way to win a war is to avoid that war entirely.

When my grandfather arrived in New York in 1914, his family were obeying that ancient Tolstoyan Peacenik rule: Run Hide. They were on board a Doukhobor (Russian Peacenik) ship, one of the last ships out of Russia after the July Crisis, and they were dodging the draft like crazy.

Did it work?

Well, look at who isn't dying in Ukraine in 2024. The ones who left in 1914.

Like I said: Turtles may be dinky dinosaurs. But they are survivors. They are willing to cross entire oceans to avoid a war zone. They are willing to hide in the mud.

Born in the Space Age

I was born in the 1960s, in a year that is the same upside down as it is right side up.

Four months before my birth, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. The age of "Camelot" began.

My mother, named Jaculene, began calling herself "Jackie."

I was born two months after Barbie got a new boyfriend named "Ken" and a month after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting the Earth once before parachuting to the ground.

Just before my birth, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, aboard Mercury-Redstone 3. His photo was still on the cover of LIFE magazine when I drew my first breath.

To say that I was one of the first children born in the "Space Age" is therefore a safe bet.

Two weeks after my birth, President Kennedy set the goal of sending an American to the Moon.

About 50 days after my birth, a young girl named after the virgin Moon goddess, Diana Frances Spencer, was delivered at Park House, Sandringham, Norfolk.

Princess Diana was definitely "my generation."

Move to Colorado Springs

In 1963, at the end of the school year, my father upped sticks from Nebraska and moved our family like the Beverly Hillbillies out to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Rob had just landed his next job, teaching art at Mitchell High School.

William "Billy" Mitchell was the World War II Air Force General famous for inventing the strategy of total warfare and fire bombing cities into complete submission, regardless of the fact that the firestorms created by these massive attacks incinerated thousands and thousands of unarmed civilians.

The guys who decided to fire-bomb Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo during World War II? The guys who gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Our hero: Billy Mitchell and his crew.

It tells you something about the mentality of people in Colorado Springs that they consider an Air Force general like Billy Mitchell their hero.

Air Force families tend to be air heads: Mindlessly patriotic flag wavers. At first, that was my mentality too.

When I was five and going through kindergarten, at the Taylor Elementary School in Colorado Springs, I would "play Air Force," running around at recess with my arms outstretched, pretending to be a plane and getting into dogfights with the other Air Aces in our class.

We would also jump from our swings on the playground swingset while singing "The Ballad of the Green Berets":

"Fighting soldiers from the sky Fearless men who jump and die Men who mean just what they say These are the men of the Green Beret."

Even back then, at the age of 5, the logic behind the song seemed a bit weird: If your daddy has just been killed in a foreign war, why not make your mom real proud by pinning silver wings on your chest, and getting yourself killed too?

Hm. Let me think about this some more.

By 1968, when I was in the third grade, the nation's mood and my mood were a bit different. Someone had spray-painted on the wall, by our classroom door a simple sentence: "Hey Hey LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?"

That summer, we saw pictures of RFK Jr. lying in a pool of his own blood on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The politics today are ugly. But it does not get much uglier than that.

In July of 1969, the night that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, my mother was in the hospital having an hysterectomy. My Dad had to make dinner for his four sons. We watched Batman on TV, had a phone call with mom at the hospital, had dinner, and then watched the Moon landing.

That night, the planet Venus was floating very close to the Moon. Some people mistook it for the lunar lander. I didn't.

My father was an art teacher, and in the bay window of our little house on Franklin Street, he had placed a beautiful piece of sculpture he had made in graduate school: The enigmatic face of a Japanese Geisha, carved in pure white marble.

I remember looking up at the Moon, then at that face, in the moonlight, thinking of the Moon, and thinking of my mother. For mankind to touch the face of the Moon -- a virgin face that had never been touched before: Wasn't there something very wrong with that?

My mother and father divorced in 1972, as the country was torn apart by Watergate. She became a book seller. We hardly ever saw our father again.

He remarried in 1975.

When I was in junior high school, I wrote a column for the North Junior Viking Herald under the sobriquet "Shernick The Seer." In one of the clips I kept, I rather scathingly mock president Nixon's State of the Union Adress, inviting the American public to enjoy World War III.

When people remind me not to use foul language when referring to Republicans, I apologize and explain: I learned all my four-letter words from Richard Nixon while listening to the Watergate tapes.

When the movie All The President's Men came out in 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post instantly became my personal heros.

In high school, I served as editor-in-chief of our high school newspaper, the FVS Dane.

In the 1980s, I studied to be a journalist, and asked God to make me a man of letters.

Result: During the 1990s, I wound up schlepping mail at the post office.

Which means, when you ask God for favors, you need to be specific. The old boy is a bit nearsighted. He tends to hang vague and abstract wishes upside down.

When planning your future, please be specific. Decide which way is up.

My motto: Been down so long, it looks like up to me.

My own life has certainly been a work of surrealistic art. Perhaps that is because my father, like his father before him, was a painter. A painter whose brush could wipe away the dust of everyday life, and turn it into something brilliant.

One of my favorite artists is Salvador Dali. I like his art and his funny mustache.

In other words: I have a lunatic side. Books on astrology say that people born on my birthday "have a unique personality that combines practicality with hard work and creativity."

The same books say that my life is ruled by the planet Venus, the planet of love. This is true but not true. My heart has been orbiting, in a very symmetric seven-year pattern, the memory of a love I lost more than 30 years ago. So my life is ruled by Venus, who really is my mistress, but I have been living a happy, single, chaste and celibate life for more than 30 years.

Now, as I look back on my life, it resembles an old curiosity shop full of beautiful books, strange dolls, puzzle boxes and striking images similar to one of Max Ernst's amusing, imaginative, and often perplexing collages. Outside the Strange Windows of this Deadly Funhouse in Time is a beautiful garden populated by sunflowers, images from the children's book Goodnight, Moon, memories of the tooth fairy, and oddly symbolic shapes, moving like kinetic art in the sunlight and the wind.

My life has been genuinely colorful, playful and delightful, especially in contrast to its dull framework (Nebraska, the rectangle in which I was born), and square surroundings (Colorado, the "Land of a Thousand Rubber Tomahawks" and the L7 state where I grew up).

Perhaps I owe the ability to think big inside a small box to my father, who hung a mobile by Jean Miro over my crib.

My father's hobby was amateur astronomy. Clearly he subscribes to that old saying by Oscar Wilde: "We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

My Dad also told some very strange and fascinating stories about Grandpa Shernick's Russian ancestors, the Princes of Chernigov, when I was a little boy. Chernigov is a city in Ukraine that is not very far from Chernobyl. My ancestors all glow in the dark.

Ukraine, of course, is very much in the news these days. We are told that World War III and the fate of Europe may hinge on what happens in Ukraine. I have no doubt that this prediction is correct: Our fate in real life also hinges very much upon what happens in Narnia or the land of fairytale -- that dark woodland where our unconscious dwells and often gets lost in the snow.

Ukraine is a land full of strange history and dark fairytales.

Passing Through the Looking Glass

My mom once called genealogy "being weird for dead people," but I think it is more accurate to call it an attempt to pass through the Looking Glass to the reality of the past: An almost desperate effort to piece together the Lost Kingdom of Yesteryear.

For me it has become an obsessive-compulsive data entry disorder with a special focus on ancient kings, daring explorers, brilliant inventors, mysterious maps to hidden treasures, baffling murder mysteries, turn-of-the century steamships, old passports, and bad-hair days, as recorded for all of eternity by school yearbook portraits, the kind that need serious color correction.

Someone has got to do the color correction, haven't they? Might as well be me.

Chalk it all up to a crush on history. My seventh-grade history teacher, Aubrey D. West, used to show up for class dressed in full Civil War uniform, and I was hooked.

While normal American high school students of the 1970s were smoking weed, reading National Lampoon or MAD magazine, listening to the Bee-Gees and, yes, reproducing, I was exploring old photos of the Civil War and reading every book ever written by Mark Twain, cover to cover.

He was from Missouri, the Show-Me State. Like my mom. Her family came from one of the First Families of Missouri. They have lived there since the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and one of our relatives, Benjamin Howard (1760 - 1814), was the first governor of Missouri Territory and a general in the War of 1812.

His job? Keep a sharp look out for the British. Perfidious Albion! If they should show up anywhere from, say, the Pacific to, oh, about the Mississippi River, give us a shout.

Every time we went out to visit family for Christmas, I would learn more from mom about the Pony Express route from Denver to St. joseph, and for amusement we would go to visit the Jesse James Home museum.

My concept of heaven was sitting in a big comfy chair at my high school library, like a cat in the sun, reading American history. All that reading got me into college.

Carleton College

I moved up to Minnesota, because it sounded quite exciting to live inside a rectangular state that was vertical.

Turns out, it was more like living inside a Frigidaire. It was extremely cold.

I read English Literature at Carleton College. That is a fine place to read books and dream of Narnian Snow Queens. Plus, there isn't really much more to do in Northfield, except maybe go see the Jesse James Day parade. Ol' Jess tried to make a very large and unauthorized withdrawal from the First National Bank in Northfield.

Turns out that was a big accounting error. The story of the shoot-out is told in a movie called The Long Riders (1980), which has an excellent soundtrack by Ry Cooder.

Northfield, Minnesota, by the way, tends to smell like burnt popcorn. That's not because of all the gun smoke or all the sex going on. It's because of the Malt-O-Meal factory. There are Lutherans in Northfield, attending St. Olaf College, so no one has sex. We wouldn't want to offend them.

I do remember very distinctly, however, studying for a calculus exam one night at the Carleton library and (with my head full of partial fraction decomposition) looking up from my textbook to see -- gliding silently past the dark windows -- an entire line of nude people on skis, wearing nothing but ski caps.

Zing went the Salvador Dali strings of my heart.

The long line of people sitting at the library carrels in front of me had also paused to look out the windows, in shock. As the long line of nude skiers disappeared into the night, we hesitated for another heartbeat. Then we all went back to our reading, without saying a word.

Lesson learned: Do I remember a single thing about partial fraction decomposition? Nope. Do I remember a simple act that suddenly made an ordinary day extraordinary? Yup.

What this world needs is a little magic, imagination, and good humor.

Perhaps that's why I joined a small circle of Carleton Pixies (our version of the Oxford Inklings) who gathered every weekend to share dramatic readings of fairytales -- led by Kara Keeling, who went on to get a Ph.D. in children's literature and is now an expert on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

I fell in love with Arthurian legends, and still remember watching Excalibur (1981) when it was first released. We watched it in the same Northfield theatre where the Rocky Horror Picture Show had the entire audience shouting out the lyrics to The Time Warp.

"Let's do the Time Warp again!"

In the strange resonance of the Grail legends, I felt I had found my mission in life: To somehow translate Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King into a modern adventure during the decade of The Kinks.

Important Note: I am a cradle Catholic, and confirmed my vows of devotion to the Catholic faith in the year 2000, but must here admit to a warm and friendly ("ecumenical") relationship with the Reformed Druids of North America, a group that began as a joke amongst some residents of Carleton's Goodhue dormitory in 1963. Not wishing to obey the college's chapel requirement, which forced them to get up early on Sunday mornings to attend a service at "a place of worship of their choice," they chose instead to invent a religion of their own -- one that allowed them to dance to loud music and drink on a Saturday night while lounging on "the Hill of Three Oaks" behind the dorm.

I first met the Carleton Druids while serving as a features writer at Carleton's student newspaper, The Carletonian, I interviewed two Carleton alumni, David and Deborah Frangquist, who were visiting the campus in October 1981. Very much to my surprise, I learned while reviewing old newsclips for the story, that there was another RDNA founder, a friend of the Franquists named Howard Cherniack. My family research on WikiTree shows he may well be a cousin of mine.

It seems that while I was not aware that I had any Druid relatives in Minnesota,, some strange form of sympathetic vibrational physics drew me up there, and my cousins proceeded to pop out of the woods and say boo.

One thing is certain: I loved writing for the Carletonian, where I met (among other people) Bob Daily and Tom Szentgyorgi, some wickedly funny 'Tonian editors who went on to brilliant careers as TV screenwriters.

I enjoyed greatly the chance to interview professors and visiting speakers, to spotlight the many social activities of our small community and to play Mark Twain by writing humor pieces. I also loved writing "slice of life" stories that attempted to capture snapshots of individual lives on the fly.

I enjoyed my time at Carleton so much that it now seems the college campus is sitting like a snow globe at the center of my mind -- a sort of theatre of memory where I can wander about and visit friends for the rest of eternity.

Yet my time there really flew. All things must pass.

In the summer of 1983, when I graduated from Carleton, I found myself at a loss for what to do next.

War Games

My uncle David Shernick, who attended my graduation with my Aunt Lucille, gave me a handsome watch as a graduation gift and offered me a summer job working at his small architectural firm in Silicon Valley.

Grateful, I took him up on the offer and enjoyed the weekends on the beach at Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was gorgeous! It was a thrill knowing that movie stars like Clint Eastwood, who had just released Sudden Impact, were living right across the bay in Monterey.

But during the week, as we road down the dangerous winding roads of Bear Creek canyon near Los Gatos, I was alarmed by the conversations in the car.

It seemed my uncle and auntie were very interested in a firm called Dalmo Victor, which handled work on two important defense contracts: Cobra Dane and Cobra Judy, the OTH-B (over-the-horizon back-scatter) radar facilities that monitor ballistic missile launches in the Soviet Union.

Cobra Dane and Cobra Judy were extremely important components of NORAD's early warning system -- actually mentioned in the 1983 movie War Games. In the movie, a high school student hacks into NORAD's computers, and accidentally starts a nuclear war.

Cobra Dane tracks all the incoming missiles.

Deeply disturbed by the fact that my uncle and aunt seemed to have a hobby that had zero to do with architecture, I was also disgruntled by the fact that their notion of putting my college education to work amounted to no more than sending me to fetch submarine sandwiches for other people at the office -- professionals who were doing real work.

This was nepotism at its worst.

I bailed on them. Apologizing profusely, I suggested they could probably get their sandwiches delivered by some local high school kids more suited for the job. They agreed.

They later told my brother Chris, who had also come out to San Jose to work for them that summer, that I would probably wind up becoming a librarian.

I headed down the coast to Santa Barbara, where I paid a visit to the beautiful young soprano who had been my girlfriend at Carleton, Terry. She was still a junior, and she would be returning to Northfield at end of summer. Our ways were fated to part.

But I missed her deeply, and while we both seemed to agree that we weren't a good match for marriage, we did enjoy a weekend sitting on the beach at Santa Barbara, next to her dog Moses, and discussing our futures.

What could one do with a fancy English major? Terry seemed to like the idea of acting, or teaching theatre. I was convinced that I wanted to try publishing, or newspaper work.

When I returned to Colorado Springs by bus, and jumped off the Greyhound with beach sand still in my tennis shoes, I was stumped. What was I to do? There were very few publishing jobs in the Springs. Only the Gazette Telegraph and Shepherd Publications.

During the year 1984, I picked up a job working as a copy editor at Wiley Law Publications, and learned quickly that publishing tax law books was definitely not the field for me -- far too boring! But I liked the editing field in general.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail

That summer I picked up a best-selling book that had made a big splash: Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.

Wow!

As a fan of all things King Arthur, I was rivetted by the general premise of the book: That the bloodline of Jesus Christ and his family, the House of David, had somehow survived all the way to the 20th century, via the family of King Arthur and several Merovingian kings of southern France.

This book was rattling around in the back of my skull when I was informed one morning that I had been laid off by Wiley "without cause."

Had I screwed up? No. Their editors in New York were just convinced that I was costing them too much money. They could job out the copy editing to freelancers.

Convinced that I needed a better resume, and more hands-on experience with copy editing, I decided to move back to Minnesota and to attend the journalism school there.

My Grail Mission

As long as I was at it, why not subvert the government? I decided to learn how to do the "Woodward and Bernstein Thing."

If I made a mistake, it was not the mistake of choosing writing or editing as a career. I truly loved writing biographies, doing photo portraits, gathering "news of the weird," spinning conspiracy theories, exploring history mysteries and sketching humorous anecdotes. These suited me perfectly to be a writer of features and variety pieces, with a few book reviews and theatre reviews thrown in for fun.

My mistake lay in being a bit too serious. I am by nature a nervous nebbish, much like Woody Allen. and playing the role of Clark Kent, ace reporter for the Daily Planet, writing straight news, simply did not suit me.

I know that now. No Ben Hecht am I.

But the Reagan Administration looked like a dragon worth slaying. In 1985, Reagan had laid a wreath at the Bitburg Cemetery in Germany, a cemetery containing the graves of many Nazi S.S. officers. He had made a speech at Bitburg Airbase that declared America's alliance with the former Nazi Germany in an all-out war against Russia.

He had in effect declared a sincere intention to become Germany's buddy and help Germany re-invade and destroy Ukraine and Russia, the homelands of both my mother and my father. To my mind, Germany was still the embodiment of Evil, and this was a madcap scheme that would certainly trigger World War III and might get us all killed.

So I moved up to Minneapolis to go to journalism school at the U of M. My Excalibur was a beat-up electric typewriter. My goal: Prevent Armageddon. Save the World. Oppose Reagan!

The famous journalist George Seldes once gave young journalists a very simple piece of advice: Tell the Truth -- and Run.

That was my game plan in a nutshell.

Yup. I was a member of what Carleton likes to call "the Last of the Big Dumb Classes." I had only a vague, unfocussed goal that probably sounded great to the ears of the hippies of the 1970s, who wanted to promote "Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman." But my game plan made zero sense to the business world.

How I was going to finance my way all the way to the top of the New York Times or the Washington Post when I did not even own a car was a mystery to me as well.

I wound up taking out more student loans -- on top of my student loans from Carleton. Brilliant.

But at least I was sincere. I was no fake.

That's saying something, because I came from the tail-end of the Baby Boom, a generation known as plastic hippies, plastic flower children or weekend hippies. These brats at the end of the Boom, were wearing Smiley Buttons that said "Have A Nice Day!" but they were trying to land internships at Monsanto or Honeywell. Those in marketing were trying to sell useless junk to school kids; and I am not talking about Pet Rocks, waterbeds, plastic pyramids, or lava lamps. In the 1980s, many of these Milo Minderbinders went on to get MBAs and work for Goldman Sachs, selling junk bonds and toxic derivatives to Iceland.

As an innocent plastic flower child, who is still trying to communicate with the world the low-tech way, by using Dixie Riddle Cups and a piece of string, I am still welcome in Iceland. But Minneapolis? People who worked hard to promote a radical leftward shift toward Pacifism were about as welcome as the James-Younger gang.

You say you want a Revolution? Good luck starting a revolution in Minneapolis. Even a hippy who is not a fake, and sincerely wants to change the world for the better, is going to be stumped by all the Dunder-Mifflin heads one finds in Minnesota's corporate environment.

Minneapolis is the home of some huge multinational corporations, like Honeywell, 3M, USBank, Alliant Tech Systems, General Mills, and Cray Inc. Honeywell was famous for making land mines and cluster bombs -- the kind that blew the legs off little kids in Vietnam.

They were welcome in Minneapolis. Pacifists were not.

Downtown Minneapolis in the mid-1980s certainly looked like a wholesome episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show, shot at the IDS Tower. But when the Cohen brothers paid a visit a decade later to make their black comedy Fargo (1996), they twigged pretty quickly to the underlying weirdness.

Underneath all that Minnesota Nice is something deeply subgenius, pervy and not nice at all: A buncha friendly but paranoid "normal" people willing to commit mass murder.

Finding a "nice" place to live was my first task.

Welcome to Dinkytown!

The only hip neighborhood in Minneapolis is Dinkytown -- the university district. My friends from Northfield called it "the Carleton Ghetto" because many of them were attending graduate school there. I found a flat on 4th Street -- the street that gave Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Positively 4th Street" its name.

After taking an Extension course on magazine writing, I wound up writing articles for a duck art magazine. Definitely a Grail mission fail.

But I also got a part-time job working as a nursing assistant at a Shriner's Hospital for Crippled Children. And through my Carleton friend Mike Adamovich I met Marv Davidov -- who was once a roommate to Bob Dylan.

Marv was a revered figure in Dinkytown. When it came to seekers of peace and justice, he was the real deal: As the leader of The Honeywell Project, Marv led a long-term political action campaign. At least once a year the HP would stage a huge protest rally outside Honeywell headquarters, designed to shame Honeywell execs in front of local TV cameras and to convince the board members attending Honeywell's annual meeting to convert their weapons manufacturing business to peaceful production.

Hand-made signs, face paint, tye-dye T-shirts, hands waved in unison, chanting through megaphones ("the people, united, will never be defeated!") etc. etc.

You know the drill.

In the course of my interview with Marv, he told me the story of a confrontation he once had with the president and CEO of Honeywell. His group had obtained graphic photos showing the injuries that Honeywell's cluster bombs did to Vietnamese children.

The executive took the photos from Marv, studied them silently, then handed them back to him saying, "We have similar photos of our own. Our ballistics people study every inch of them very carefully. We use them to learn precisely how we can make our explosive devices more effective -- and more damaging.

"Please don't misunderstand, Mr. Davidov. I love children. What happened to this child was tragic. But our job is to make weapons that work. The decisions about when and where to use those weapons is entirely up to Congress and the military. I suggest that if you object to what we are doing in Vietnam you speak with your congressman, all right? Have a good day!"

When I heard this, a chill went through me. I decided I wanted to be like Marv Davidov and Michael Moore. I wanted to start asking executives like this guy at Honeywell some really tough questions -- and to record their answers.

Objectively, of course. I intended to be objective with these bastards.

Then the public could decide whether to call their congressmen.

Mark vs. The Army

I fought on. Signed up for a master's degree in journalism, and joined the staff of the Minnesota Daily, then hidden in the basement of the Journalism school on Church Street. Circulation: 40,000. Practically a real newspaper!

Before being Shot Down in Flames, I did manage to team with Monika Bauerlein, a star reporter at the Minnesota Daily (now an editor with Mother Jones magazine) on a glorious series of articles exposing how the U.S. Army intended to use the university's supercomputer center to design a wide variety of Top Secret weapons systems.

Minneapolis is a major center for high-performance computing because it is the home of Cray Inc., a supercomputers firm that was established by Seymour Cray in 1976 after he graduated from the U of M's engineering school -- right across the street from the Hubbard School of Journalism.

The Army granted the University of Minnesota $66.9 million and in return wanted to use their supercomputers to design and game out "Star Wars" -- the militarization of outer space. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (called SDI or Star Wars) was named after the very first Star Wars movie, which was released in 1977.

As an assistant researcher and interviewer, I called DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and at least a dozen high-security military weapons laboratories across the United States, seeking comments, asking probing questions and probably earning myself a nice thick dossier at the local FBI in the process.

Monika won a very well-deserved SPJ/SDX award for her excellent reporting on the Army grant. The entire Army Grant series was designed and overseen by the Daily's talented editor-in-chief, Dan Eggen, who now works with the Washington Post.

In addition to an SPJ/SDX award we also got funny comments from students who scrawled graffiti on the walls of the walkways over the Mississippi River between east campus and west campus: "Why is everyone complaining about Amy Grant? I like Amy Grant!"

Sigh.

Some Kind of Wonderful

This was the late 1980s. The year that Some Kind of Wonderful came out.

About that time, one of my co-workers at the Minnesota Daily, a brilliant and talented writer who rose from the depths of Lake Minnehaha like Nimüe, clutching Excalibur in her hands, said boo and asked me out on a date.

Surprised (this had never happened to me before), I gladly agreed. We went out for a picnic. Perhaps inspired by Lick The Tins' punk version of the song "Can't Help Falling In Love," I completely fell for M. She really was a vision "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," and as far as I was concerned, a dream come true.

I thought we were well matched, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. She was completely charming. We were made for each other.

Or, rather, we were connected somehow by some shared and vaguely remembered "dream" from our very deep past. How can I describe this? She was like an Alice in Wonderland, an Alice sadly wandering through the fields of Elysium, in search of a lost loved one.

I was not entirely certain that I was the True Love that she was seeking.

But I thought: Here is one of my Druid kin, popping up out of the woods, and inviting me on a Teddy Bear's Picnic. All I knew is that I recognized her somehow as a very important part of my life in the past, and a very important piece of the puzzle that is my life at present.

Let me put it this way: Perhaps one does not have to believe in reincarnation. Perhaps our DNA, the map of the world that inhabits every cell of our body, contains a holographic map or "Hall of Records" of everything that ever happened to our ancient ancestors, recorded like a memory.

If that is the case, then something in every cell of me was saying: This is a good match. This is a woman I am meant to serve -- with my entire life, if necessary.

The day after an explosive 4th of July holiday, I asked the mysterious Miss Marvelous to marry me and was amazed when she said yes. For about a month, I was on Cloud 9.

That cloud soon darkened. M travelled to Denver to attend the Denver Publishing Institute and while she was there she met with my brother, Michael, who was going through his Boulder Hippy art student phase. He probably told her his version of our family history.

When she returned, her attitude was odd. Different.

If I had only looked at M's own family and heritage, I might have understood why. She was Norwegian all the way back to the 19th century, and Lutheran. Her family embodied that sometimes cold but always kind-hearted and lovely Lutheran culture that I had seen across town at St. Olaf's College, the Minnesotan culture invoked by Garrison Keillor in his wonderful "Lake Wobegone" stories.

The way Keillor (a graduate of the University of Minnesota's journalism school) once put it, the whole point behind Scandinavian culture is to be "more normal than the kid sitting next to you."

Are they uncomfortable with eccentric? O yah!

Perhaps my brother Mike had told her that my parents were Catholic, but divorced. Perhaps she had heard about the Russian-Jewish branch of our family tree. Perhaps she herself had deduced that I am koo-koo for Coco-Puffs, and not exactly the best dancer in the whole wide world.

Who knows? Bottom line: There was a lot about my personality and my family's history that simply does not always sit very well with conservative Norwegian and Lutheran families in Minnesota.

The match was awkward at times. But I thought it was working! I thought she liked me.

At least: I was certain that she was kind, intelligent, and no religious bigot. Her concern seemed to center on a much more important, and reasonable question. Did I really love her?

One afternoon she surprised me by putting me to a simple test. It was probably an idea she found in Redbook while getting her hair done and reading an article titled "10 Ways to Discover If He Really Loves You!"

I later realized that it was a perfectly legitimate Grail Test -- that is, a love test or assay. Back in the middle ages, a woman was allowed to "test a knight's metal" to see if he was gold or fool's gold, by sending him out on a quest, or by posing a riddle.

While I was seated in a chair, she stood behind me and covered my eyes with her hands.

"Mark," she asked in her dulcet tones, "what color are my eyes?"

I paused. Far too long. But the question was unfair! She had these sad, beautiful eyes that were changing constantly like the water in a crystal clear lake. Their color depended upon her mood and what the sky and the light were doing that day.

"Blue?"

Wrong answer. From that day forward, her eyes were the color of a storm at sea -- like the glint of sunlight on a cold Norwegian fjord.

Thanks, Redbook!

Seriously: The barometric pressure began to fall, and her mood became turbulent. She became standoffish. She began to invent excuses to leave me alone for entire weekends.

Her sister, father and mother were trying to keep her home more often. They did not like the large amounts of time we were spending together -- we could not even snuggle and hug without being interrupted by a phone call from her mom, asking if M had seen one of her father's shirts.

I laughed at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't funny. They were putting some serious pressure on her.

One night she gave me a call, and was weeping -- there were tears going into the receiver -- yet she wouldn't say why. I felt as confused as Sir Perceval at Montsalvat, being confronted by a Grail maiden with an emotional puzzle: How should I respond to her tears?

I fumbled for the right answer. I had no idea how to comfort M.

Why was she crying? I didn't have a clue. I couldn't read the Runes.

Grail Test Fail No. 2. Telepathic empathy skills: zero. In terms of sympathetic vibrational physics, I felt enormous sympathy for her. But the message received was entirely cryptic. A paradox. I could not for the life of me fathom why she was weeping.

Psychic foresight: 1. I knew we were in the middle of a riddle. Something was wrong.

Black Swan Event

A couple weeks later we were invited to Stub & Herb's for lunch by her friends. A bolt-from-the-blue hit me as I was biting into my Fried Chicken Sandwich on brioche. One of the women present suddenly "staged an intervention" and bluntly informed me that M. had slept with three other men at the Daily. She named names.

Wide-eyed and confused, I looked at my sweetie and saw that she was staring at her feet and blushing furiously. Was her sweet-and-sour sauce too hot?

No!

She was holding the bridge of her nose. Was she about to cry?

I began to realize with alarm that something was genuinely and terribly wrong. I stuttered, lamely, in her defence, that I did not mind if I were not the first, or that she had loved three other men, I myself had loved three other women. I only hoped that I should be M's last love.

M was cringing. She got up quickly and left. This was way too embarrassing.

I had tried to say the right thing, to comfort her. Yet, somehow, I had said exactly the wrong thing. M's female friends looked at each other nervously. Ooo.

By failing to go out the door after her, had I failed Grail Test No. 3?

They had just told me that M wasn't exactly stuck on me. In fact she had betrayed me. Repeatedly. I had just told them that it didn't matter. I was stuck on her. My love for M would be as constant as the Northern Star.

I was telling the truth: She is still near the center of my heart, and I love her and remember her fondly to this day, 35 years later. She left a very deep impression on me.

What I was trying to tell them was this: Her past did not matter to me. All I wanted was to be with her from this day forward. To honor her, to love her and to serve her.

What they were trying to communicate to me, in 64-point Bodoni Bold, was a news flash: It Ain't Going To Happen, Chum. Game Over.

I didn't get it.

Instead of reacting as they thought I would react, I just sat there calmly, with a blank, dazed look on my face. I just sat and listened to the dark song of the swans, transfixed. They apologized for intervening this way, but explained slowly that when they learned from M that we were engaged to marry they had become alarmed.

They understood that I was kind, shy, morally conservative (ha!), raised Catholic, and probably expected some form of ho-hum monogamous relationship with M. Given what they knew about her love for the dashing waves of wild romance, and her desire to go a-Viking every other weekend, my own visions of a future life of cozy domestic bliss with her were probably delusional.

Did I understand? Delusional.

It wasn't going to happen. Not even if I managed to buy a Chain-o-Lakes condo on Lake Minnehaha with two-door garage attached -- something i could not possibly afford.

They had gathered from M that her family objected to our match. Her mother, especially. M came from a nice family (translation: A Lutheran family). They thought that their daughter could do "much better" than a Mark Shernick. So they were pressuring M to end things.

When M's friends heard her say this, they grew concerned that she had set me up to take a very hard fall. So they had agreed to intervene.

They suggested, gently, that, in view of M's boy-crazy promiscuity, we really were not a terribly good match. It might be best for both of us to have a long, serious chat and reconsider our engagement. Okay? They were telling me this for my own good.

They wished me luck. With that they awkwardly begged to be excused and vanished.

Fried Chicken

I sat there frozen over my fried chicken sandwich.

I could not -- would not -- believe this was happening. M would not cheat on me. Nor was she a religious bigot.

But the way she had blushed and left the restaurant -- like Jesse James trying to get out of Northfield fast -- suggested it might actually be true. I found my head spinning, like Woody Allen in a neurotic anxiety spiral.

M had casually informed me once, that one of her theatre friends had called her "a 1980s reincarnation of Holly Golightly."

Come to think of it, that was not a good sign. It meant M not only looked cool in sunglasses -- she might also have a tendency to expertly fleece men and leave them angrily pounding on her door while she hid inside her apartment exclaiming "Quel rat!"

As for coming from a nice family: They were right. Her family were lovely. She did have a handsome home, because her dad was an airline mechanic, her mom an educator.

Is it possible she found out that my family had some Jewish heritage and this somehow made a big difference to her mom and dad?

Had M actually slept with three of our friends at the office? Was I myself just another rat in her eyes? Was she some kind of deranged nymphomaniac starring in her very own Bret Easton Ellis novel -- a brat pack masterpiece complete with a soundtrack by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions?

I thought about the mix tape that she had given me, and some of the song choices began to make more sense. Why had she chosen "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole?

"Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart? Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep. They just lie there, and they die there. Are you warm? Are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?"

Friend is a Four-Letter Word

The next morning, M called me on my phone (we still had landlines back then) and set a time to come over to my place. When she arrived, she said she hoped we could part amicably.

Urrrr? Did she just say part? Amicably? As in FRIENDS?

Obviously, she said, she was dealing with some serious issues and emotional problems, and in her view I myself had a "Hamlet problem."

My heart sank like an elevator dropping 12 stories in 2 seconds. So much for discussion. She had already made up her mind. This was it. What I had feared the most: The Long Goodbye.

Suddenly another song choice on her mix tape made sense: If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? by Mental As Anything.

My God. The Swans had told the truth. This was just routine for her: Using men and casually discarding them.

She had done this before.

I tried to hold back the tears. Wasn't able to.

And I was puzzled by that last remark. Hamlet problem? What Hamlet problem? Was this some sort of idea my brother Michael had put in her head?

I loved her, I said.

"Yeah, right. Could we speed this up a little? I've got to get to class."

Um. Okay. I loved her. But I understood very clearly why neither of us could move forward.

"Excellent."

Her parents were interfering and objecting to me, because I was poor. My brother Mike may have interfered and raised some doubts in her mind.

"Yup."

And now an entire group of her trusted friends had just urged me to call it off. They were doing this "for my own good."

"Exactly! So glad you understand."

I should be happy we had shared a beautiful and very hot summer together.

"Hee! Mmm. Well . . . . It was nice."

In tears, I said that I had thought long and hard about it, and reached the difficult conclusion that our friends were probably right. We probably were not very well matched. And, in the end, all that really mattered to me was that she should be happy in life. Okay?

"Okay! Great. I was afraid you would take this the wrong way. Well, I'm off to class. Ta, Mark! Sois bien sage, d'accord?"

I wished her a goodbye, and let her go.

She checked her watch and left my apartment quickly, leaving only a hint of expensive rose perfume (Anais by Cacherel?) behind. During the next weeks she packed up her things and left the Minnesota Daily offices as well.

I felt like Holly Golightly's nameless cat, left in the rain.

Brazil

How could I have been so stupid? To think -- to hope -- that it might work, and that our families and friends would not interfere?

I had been deftly shunted into the discard bin. Amongst the many romantic adventures of her own life, my scenes had been abruptly relegated to the DVD Extras. The comical flubs section, probably.

In the book version of Breakfast at Tiffany's (not the movie version), Holly Golightly simply jets off to Brazil and never comes back.

Truman Capote got it right: The Hollies of the Jet-Set 1960s simply left you and never came back. They would rocket out to Rio. That was that. You were left behind hunting for Holly's cat.

But the Hollies of the 1980s? Why should they inconvenience themselves by leaving? They had a tendency, like Truman's Swans of the 1970s, to simply continue swanning around the very same social circles and parties, pretending there wasn't a dead man floating face down in their pool.

A New Gig

A month later I learned from mutual friends at the Daily that my former fiancee had "a new gig" -- M. had moved on to a talented sculptor, someone dishy she had met at an art gallery.

There was even a rumor that they were engaged to marry.

WHAT? This news floored me. I couldn't believe it. Was it possible that a month after she had broken off her engagement to me she was engaged once again? That was pretty fast work, even for a sharp East Ender like M!

I suddenly realized what I should have seen from the start: My sweetheart had been two-timing. Those weekends when she had gone missing? She had been out at parties, and had never stopped "husband shopping."

I had been double-crossed.

This artful dodger had probably scoped Mr. Chiseler and his testworthy toolkit long before breaking up with me. Which meant . . . the entire luncheon, and the story about her flings with three other men?

Un conte de fées. A fairytale. An invention.

There was indeed an intervention, but it was not an intervention designed to protect poor Mark from taking a painful fall. M's circle of Dinkytown Swans had helped her to give yours truly the Big Push -- the old heave-ho.

My guess: The Swans had known there was a new man waiting in the wings all along -- he might even be someone they had spotted and chosen for her.

What a sap I had been! What I was dealing with, here, was a Cruel Heart Society -- a circle of catty snobs from wealthy Minnesota families who were acting like Hardy Jens and his crowd of insufferable high school brats in Some Kind of Wonderful.

This was so high school!

To M our engagement was no different from shopping for clothing at a Target department store, making a selection, then abruptly throwing that selection back on the sales counter when she found a lovely new item she liked oh-so-much better.

She hadn't exactly fought very hard to keep me, now had she? Simply left me in a rumpled heap. Miss Felicity Cutpurse had certainly made short work of me.

Gobstopping! As all this miching malicho sank in, my boiling blood began to chill to subzero and turned to ice. Quel rat!

Show Down at the Thursday Night Club

The next time M. came in to visit the Daily's "Thursday Night Club" (the beer party that followed completion of the last newspaper of the week) I confronted her and we had a full, loud and frank exchange of honest opinions, right in front of the entire editorial staff.

Some of the men on staff secretly understood why I was steaming. To quote Raymond Chandler: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

Or, to quote John Barrymore: "Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock."

I had just discovered that M. looked like a ripe haddock. She was behaving not at all like Lady Guinevere or the deep soul mate of my druid dreams and very much more like a Light Street tart.

I blew my stack. I chewed her out. This time it was her turn to leave in tears, the emotions clawing at her shocked face like a wide-eyed kitten hanging onto a screen door, afraid of falling.

I thought I would never see her ghost again.

But, surprisingly, a few weeks later, she zoomed by the Daily office and passed eerily like a phantom across the doorway -- a very rare appearance -- looking tearful, desperate, and frightened.

The Woman in White

What was wrong? Had someone died?

She saw that I was watching her, blanched with fear and then quickly flitted out the exit. Strangely, my heart went with her.

For during the last few weeks I had repented of my hard-hearted assessment of her. Something told me that my initial impression, that I had met the living embodiment of an ancient Celtic love story, was correct. She was deeply engraved, somehow, onto every cell of my DNA. I was not going to be able to just erase her over night.

She was the living image of a very deep memory -- one that was not going to go away at all.

I couldn't help but feel like the night traveller in Wilkie Collins gothic mystery novel The Woman in White when he is startled in the woods to find a beautiful mad woman racing in the moonlight amongst the darkened trees. She crosses his path, causing his horse to rear, and only pauses long enough to give him a terrified glance before continuing her pell-mell flight.

How intriguing! What did this mean? Why had she come back - only to run away again?

I began to worry. I had never seen M. look so haggard and scared. Was she in trouble?

She had probably popped in to find her best friend, D. But D was out.

I decided not to follow M -- that would only upset her -- but decided I might help her by giving D a call, telling her that M apparently wanted to speak with her.

Come to think of it, I wanted to speak with D myself.

I rang the number in the staff directory. No answer. Then I noticed the street address -- only a short bus ride away -- and thought: "Time for a long talk with D. Perhaps she can shed some light on this."

Also, I wanted to confirm once and for all: Were the rumors true? Was M engaged? Was there any hope left for me?

Sword through the Heart

Getting dumped leaves one in a state of emotional agony -- a state of extremely confused and contradictory urges. You are skewered, paralyzed and unable to do anything about it -- bound like a miserable prisoner by mind-forged manacles, something that psychologists call an an approach-avoidance conflict.

In high school we had once translated a short and pithy poem by Catullus, No. 85, titled Odi et Amo: "I hate and I love. Don't ask why I do it. My pain proves it's true. That's all there is to it."

Catullus was right: You can hate someone and feel so hurt and angry at them you want to strangle them, and yet at the same time tell yourself that you love them with all your mind, all your strength and all your heart.

The two feelings are entirely contradictory yet very powerful and urgent, and that's what drives you bats. On one hand, the knuckles read L-O-V-E. On the other hand, the knuckles read H-A-T-E.

Poets back to the days of ancient Rome have given us a simple explanation for why the self becomes deeply divided. Simple: Rejected love cuts your heart in two. It splits your mind in half. The deep injustice of a true love betrayed feels exactly like an arrow or a sword piercing straight through the center of your heart. It pins you.

In the analogy and symbolism of the Holy Grail, it has been compared to the Spear of Longinus, which pierces through the heart of Christ and pins him to the cross.

Put much more simply:

Love hurts.

What do you do when jilted? Women have the very same problem.

This is a major theme running through dozens of songs about women who have been abused, jilted, or used and cast aside. Joan Baez, in particular, does a fine job of voicing a jilted woman's complaint in her ballads "The Queen of Hearts" and "Silver Dagger."

Here are the lyrics from Joan's YouTube performance of The Queen of Hearts.

"To the queen of hearts he's the ace of sorrow. He's here today, he's gone tomorrow. Young men are plenty but sweethearts few. If my love leaves me what shall I do?"

What shall I do? What shall I do? That plaint summarizes neatly the utter despair of rejection and the confusing central question that tortures a person caught in the cross of an extreme approach-avoidance conflict.

In the same way, the violence that men do to women drives women mad -- especially if they feel paralyzed or trapped in a marriage to an adulterous male.

Baez's ballad Silver Dagger expresses that madness neatly, and it is an emotional knot or chain that is very familiar to many families.

The mother, having been abused by men in past, becomes paranoid and hyper-protective of her daughters. She won't let her daughters go anywhere near men, or she insists on controlling every aspect of their courtship and marriage.

An intelligent daughter often chafes at this parental control -- especially if she has reached college age and is still living at home with mom and dad. She may become extremely rebellious. But this puts her into an extremely painful approach-avoidance conflict of her own: She can either please her mother or please her lover. She cannot please them both. She is being forced to choose.

Without the proper training, Minnesotan Grail maidens who lie at the bottom of Lake Minnehaha are also in quite a severe bind. The waves are chilling, and the sword Excalibur is sharp. It cuts their hands to the bone.

I believe that I ran into exactly such an OCD mom and rebellious daughter when I began courting M. I failed to recognize the problem in time. Only many, many years later, when I was watching the 2017 coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird, starring the delightful Saoirse Ronan, did I realize "My God! That's exactly the situation that M was enduring with her mother!"

Perhaps I was so near-sighted because my own family had similar issues. My parents divorced when I was only 10. The finding, by modern psychologists, that dysfunctional families lack clear and honest communications, and tend to drive children crazy with diabolically cruel double-binds, double-talk and double-speak rings true.

The emotional knots that resulted were complex. The dysfunctions in M's family were possibly much different from the dysfunctions in my family. But the emotional pain that resulted was very plain and simple: Love hurts.

It's an accusation of adultery, not the loss of a wine cup, that destroyed the Round Table. Dissonance, when amplified, can shatter every wine glass in the room!

What broke their circle of faith was the evil rumor that Queen Gwenwhyfar had betrayed Arthur with his best friend, Sir Lancelot. That claim of adultery tore the Round Table apart, and sent Sir Lancelot reeling into exile and madness.

My problem with the MInnesota Daily? It was not a newspaper so much as a gossip mill, and the staff were all learning to become experts on spinning out sharp, soul-killing rumors: The kind that desttroy reputations. The kind that destroy lives.

The Daily was simply a Dinkytown version of the royal courts of Russia, France and Denmark in the 19th Century -- atrocious gossip mills, full of cutthroat diplomacy, intrigue and political conspiracy, fueled by alcohol, cocaine, sex, or -- in the Daily's case -- Leinenkugel's beer.

An injury to the heart is what Hamlet means by "the pangs of despised love." He means that rejected love can drive us mad with grief. Dissonance destroys us.

Love will tear us apart.

My heart was torn. My grievance was real. My imagination had run amok. I thought IS THIS LOVE? Should I approach M? Should I avoid M?"

Believe it or not, I was still holding a torch for her hoping that we might reconcile. Something deep within me told me to hold to that original dream of her that had impelled me toward her in the first place: That deep DNA dream from the Hall of Records that probably leads all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

I had been shallow, mean and false to the deeper reality of the eternal spirit of our ancestors. I felt very badly about shouting at her and wanted to make things right somehow.

Chasing M didn't look like the way to go. The 1982 murder of my beloved high school classmate, actress Dominique Dunne (1959 - 1982), had, at least, taught me that much! Best to seek help -- ask D's advice and talk to D as an intermediary.

The Green Mill

After several rings, D answered the door and we went across the street to the Green Mill for coffee. Let's just say that the scene that followed left me in no doubt whatever that I was no longer welcome in M's life.

D confirmed everything.

Yes, M had slept with three or four of our co-workers. Yes she was seeing someone new, and yes they were engaged. No she was not interested in reconciling with me. In fact, the very opposite was true. Our argument had scared the hell out of her. As far as both M and D were concerned, I was just another Rusty Trawler -- a jilted lover pounding on her door.

In fact, after our shouting match at the Daily, M was convinced that I had gone psycho, like Glenn Close in the movie Fatal Attraction (1987). I should take a hint and take a hike.

The gravity of this news bounced off my head like an Apple i-Phone bouncing off the head of Sir Isaac Newton. Hello! Ouch! She really was engaged?

I was just beginning to process this horrible fact when I was surprised to see M entering the front door of the Green Mill with a police officer in tow. Unbeknownst to me, M and her new boyfriend had been inside D's apartment when I arrived, and they were convinced I was there to murder them.

They had called the police. D had kept me busy talking while the policeman arrived.

M and the policeman marched up to my table and M yelled, in a very loud voice, for all the restaurant to hear, that I should leave her alone. "Leave me alone!"

Then the policeman asked me what I thought I was doing.

"What?" I paused in stunned silence. The whole restaurant was now watching us.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. I said I thought I was having coffee with a friend.

"Okay, well, uh . . . Then keep it friendly. And you are to leave this young lady here alone. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "I would be happy to leave her alone."

With that, M and the policeman left. There was some chuckling at the table next to ours. "Do you guys always bring the police on your dates?"

Mortified, D and I ignored them, paid the tab, and left. I gave D a hug, and asked her to please tell M that this was all a big misunderstanding. I had not been aware that she and her friend were at D.'s apartment. In fact I had only just learned, five minutes ago, that he really existed. I meant them no harm.

Then I went home and did what any reasonable man would do: I put my head in my hands and cried like a baby. I had never felt more humiliated, rejected and crushed in all my life.

My Hamlet Problem, or The Unfair Ophelia

What had I been thinking? "She'll Come Back to Me"? All my hopes for a happy life with M had just been dealt a death blow. Shattered.

When there were no more tears, I stared blankly at the wall for a couple of hours. Then I calmly went to a local drugstore and bought a bottle of sleeping pills. Brought them home. Set them on the kitchen table. Just stared at them.

To be, or not to be?

I laughed bitterly. Well, what do you know? M. was right. I really did have a Hamlet problem.

The problem was: Hamlet truly loved the unfair Ophelia. With all his heart. And that's why she was driving him crazy.

Hamlet knew with a dead certainty that agent Ophelia was working for The Enemy: His step-father, the King. All hope of any love from her had been obliterated. She was on the wrong team.

Yet Hamlet loved Ophelia anyway. Loved her madly.

What a perfect analogy! M had used me, dumped me, and betrayed me in the most cold and horrible way that one human being can betray another.

Yet I loved her anyway. I was still entirely captivated by her charm.

Was it really necessary to be so cruel, and reject me so loudly in front of an entire restaurant full of people and a cop? No.

Had she ever loved me at all? Apparently not!

So why ever had she asked me out at all? Why?

Why Why Why

That's the question that was now deeply vexing me. It drove me mad. She had seemed to be such a lovely and intelligent person. Why would she ask me out, romance me, wine and dine me, if she didn't really love me?

And there, like the curly-toed shoes of Polonius poking out from under the curtain, was the answer.

She was an agent. She wasn't acting on her own behalf. She was doing whatever her nasty little circle of Dinkytown Swans suggested. They were deciding everything by committee!

But why would this strange committee of Dinkytown Swans use her and send M after me? Who were these people?

Her friend D? The leader of the Swans of Dinkytown? Was a member of one of the most powerful and conservative business families in Minnesota. The University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management was named after them. State Auditor Arne Carlson was a member of D's family tree.

Cherchez La Tree

Aha! Cherchez la family tree. My mistake had been viewing both M and D as isolated individuals, neglecting their network, their politics, their religion, their values and their social context. These weren't witches. Worse!

These were Young Republicans.

Arne Carlson was the Republican nemesis of Paul Wellstone, one of my political science professors at Carleton College. They had recently duked it out in a very hotly fought race for the position of State Auditor.

The Carlsons were major movers and shakers in the local Republican Party -- Reagan's crowd. My sworn enemies.

They had tagged me as a leftie, and bagged me. In short, M was not only a seducer of men at the Daily, she was an informant. An agent.

This was all political. Why had she been so cold to me? Because her crowd detested people like me. The Young Republicans of the 1980s were a federation of nationalists who strongly supported Reagan's pro-German policy. Their network in many ways overlapped the neo-Nazi movement in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Europe.

See Russ Bellant's book Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party (Boston, MA: Southend Press, 1991). Note in particular the chapter on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists -- a neo-fascist group of Ukrainians who strongly supported Reagan's long-term plan to join Germany in an effort to overrun Ukraine and Russia with NATO troops.

My own family was deeply divided by the civil war within Ukraine: My mother's family being German-speakers from western Ukraine who would probably support the OUN, my father's family being Jewish Ukrainians who were massacred by OUN partisans in the small town of Mizoch in 1942.

They were rabidly opposed to Reagan's plan. In fact (as I would discover years later, while building my Dad's family tree), they closely resembled the family of Jared Kushner, whose grandmother Rae Kushner had fought with NKVD-trained and equipped partisans in Poland during the war.

That the FBI should view such immigrant groups with deep suspicion is very understandable, given their close ties to the Soviet NKVD. M and her friends were not entirely wrong to hold my family at arm's length. As I have learned in recent year, much to my chagrin, my family name is very strongly associated with the NKVD and Soviet spies.

Even back in the 1980s, I understood that there was a solid gold question mark twenty feet tall standing over my family's Russian history. You don't grow up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of the Air Force Academy and NORAD, without getting some pretty hard stares when people hear you using a Russian-sounding name.

When Paul Wellstone (1944 - 2002), the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants Leon and Minnie Wellstone, ran against Arne Carlson in 1982, he made many far-right enemies in Minneapolis. When he later became a U.S. Senator for the state of Minnesota, George Bush had loudly asked one of his friends in the room "Who is this chickenshit?"

If I was a Jewish-looking Ukrainian who had studied under Paul Wellstone at Carleton, then the local Young Republicans and their friends in the local chapter of the OUN suspected that I was wearing red Russian underwear.

They sent M to find out. Whether she knew it or not, she was being used as a cat's paw, an informant, by some people within her tight little circle of Swans.

The police showing up so suddenly and promptly to protect M? They were probably her real employers! I had just been scoped and profiled by an unknown but extremely conservative component of the Young Republicans in Minnesota, and they were probably acting as a vigilante group that handed all info collected on leftists at the Minnesota Daily to the local Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit.

M's only interest in seducing me had been getting all the personal information she could get on me, my family and my network of friends. And once she had that, she bailed.

I sat looking at the bottle of sleeping pills for a long time.

Nobody's Fault But Mine

Who was I kidding?

I could blame M for being cruel to me, blame cruel-hearted fascists for plotting to destroy me and the entire world, and give everyone the finger by saying "goodbye, cruel world!" but at the end of the day, if I ruined my own life and threw it away, it was nobody's fault but mine.

It was only when I thought of my family -- and how hurt they would be -- that I finally pitched the bottle into a trash bin.

Clearly I had screwed up big time. I had lost M. But I still had my family and many friends and I still loved my family. I didn't want to hurt them.

For the next month, I was profoundly depressed, It was as if the Sun itself had gone out. All the sunshine went out of my life. It was hard even to get up in the morning or find the motivation to go to work.

But gradually I recovered. I decided it was too early to throw in the towel. I got back on my feet and decided to go another round.

And then I launched into the Army Grant story mentioned above. I wasn't going to give up without a fight!

If the Reagan crowd were trying to militarize outer space, and if they were hijacking a publicly funded supercomputer center at the University of Minnesota to do it, putting the life-time work of dozens of neutral science professors at risk of being zapped with the Army's "classified research" wand, then the public had the right to know.

If the university was allowing the U.S. Army to use these supercomputers to design a new generation of superweapons, the whole world genuinely needed to know. These weapons might pose a risk to every single man, woman and child on the planet.

The University of Minnesota was, in fact, one of a dozen universities that had secretly participated in the Army's Manhattan Project during World War II. Professor Alfred O.C. Nier, a physicist at the U of M, used mass spectrometry to isolate U-235 in laboratories just down the street from our journalism school. Nier had mailed his samples to Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.

Was the university now participating in a new Manhattan Project? Working on a new generation of superweapons that put our world at risk? Our Daily team set out to discover all we could.

Genetic Weapons, or, The Dragon's Teeth

I can't summarize the whole series here. But there is one interview that Monika Bauerlein and I did together that stays with me to this day. We met with the dean of the university's IT department, Ettore "Jim" Infante, and he said something that surprised us both.

He said that the potential use of supercomputing to game out Star Wars did not scare him half so much as what the Army's biolabs might do with genetic weapons. "We are very near to sequencing the entire human genome, and when that happens . . . ." He paused, and his eyes got wide, as if staring into The Abyss. "Yikes!"

In fact the Human Genome Project completed its international effort to identify, map, and sequence all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint in 2003.

We are now well past our second decade of laboratory experiments with the manipulation -- and weaponization -- of human genetics. Many of dean Jim Infante's worst nightmares are well on their way to becoming true nightmares.

But Monika and I remained largely focused on the potential destruction that could result from Star Wars, and the militarization of outer space.

The international neutrality of space was at risk, and the possibility that a wide variety of spy satellites, beam weapons and nukes might soon be hovering over our heads seemed only too real, even way back in 1989.

Gorbachev's Visit

On 3 June 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev paid a visit to the Twin Cities, shaking hands and working the crowd. Several reporters from the Minnesota Daily attended the events.

I am pretty convinced that, during that time period, someone sold or handed off to the Russians all of the information that we student reporters had so painstakingly gathered on the university's Army Grant.

Why do I think this? Because we were hacked.

One morning, right in the middle of the Army Grant story, as we were pushing our deadline to complete the series, I logged onto my terminal at the Minnesota Daily to find a dozen different automated messages indicating "unauthorized access" to all of my files.

This meant the attack came from the outside of our system. It was not simply a managing editor or Assistant Managing Editor looking over our shoulders. This was different. Entire files had been copied and extracted.

M was long gone by that time. I was sure that it was not her. But here, once again, I was bitterly confronted with the consequence of working on serious, front-line news in the middle of a field where reporters are fighting hard to get their hands on military information hidden by defense contractors.

If you performed your "watch dog" function well, as a reporter, and succeeded in serving the citizens of the United States by uncovering the details of a Star Wars contract, absolutely nothing prevented all of your hard work from going straight into the hands of some unnamed, masked agency, that could break into your files and rifle through them, taking God knows what and why.

We were information raped.

This hacking incident forced me to confront an extremely uncomfortable reality: After working hard to inform the public about a high-performance computer system at the University of Minnesota that was designing doomsday scenarios in outer space, the underwhelming reaction we got was a dinky SPJ/SDX award (a pat on the head) and a bunch of nervous joking. "Why is everyone complaining about Amy Grant? I like Amy Grant!"

Nothing really changed.

The United States Army and the Soviet Red Army did not waver by even a semi-demiquaver in their rock solid determination to fight each other tooth and nail to the bitter end.

The outcome of all my efforts was not Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman. On the contrary, one could argue that I may have gone a long way toward giving the Russians information which they could exploit: By sounding an alarm over supercomputers and persuading people within Russia's scientific community to spend more time and effort building advanced nuclear and biological weapons of their own.

While modern day propaganda touts Ukrainians as valiant underdogs, I also need to remind the reader, gently, that Ukraine in 1989 was still pointing nuclear missiles. My distant relatives in Ukraine? Had their fingers on the trigger of a huge nuclear arsenal, one that they were pointing right at us.

It had not been disarmed by our newspaper series. It seemed they were still perfectly willing to push the button. In fact, for all I knew, our "Army Grant" series had just persuaded a Ukrainian missile control officer to target the University of Minnesota's supercomputer center with a nuclear warhead.

Not exactly the peaceful outcome I had pictured! My entire approach toward using journalism to promote Christian pacifism clearly needed a serious rethink.

Also, given the huge amounts of time I had put into this project, I could have made more money per hour working at a McDonald's.

As for social impact: I sometimes got the impression that Brother Jedd and Sister Cindy, two holy rollers often seen on the front steps of the Kauffman Student Center declaring that they had found "The King of Kings at Burger King" were doing a better job grabbing public attention and working for social change.

Who was I fooling? After we got done firing our spitballs at the U.S. Army, they just ran over us like a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Meanwhile, if your girlfriend isn't dumping you because her family thinks you are a leftist loser wearing red underwear, then you have to deal with the fact that the Russian GRU may indeed be dipping into your files and offloading all the information you just gathered into their files -- putting your country, your family, her family, and all of those readers you were supposedly "serving" at serious military risk.

Who was I really serving? The reading public? Or the Soviet GRU?

I had shown enormously bad judgment. M had been right to leave me for a sculptor.

This was a foolhardy quest. Even President Gorbachev forgot to send me a Thank You card. Probably because the Soviet GRU listed reporters like me under the heading "useful idiot."

A Winter of Discontent

I dropped out of graduate school -- all but my master's thesis completed -- and left journalism forever.

Truth and lies? They both used the same make-up kit, the same expensive perfumes and colognes. They wear the same designer clothes.

After being completely blindsided by an extremely talented faker, I no longer trusted my own radar. I no longer trusted journalists, period.

I no longer trusted me.

I quit the Daily. I got an "honest" job at the post office. A blue collar job.

A responsible guy has to repay his student loans, right? I still believed in honor.

But love? Ha! Not for me.

The plastic engagement rings from gum ball machines? Not for me. You can keep 'em. Or put 'em in a box, tie 'em with a ribbon, and throw 'em in the deep blue sea.

To torture myself, I would sometimes replay the old tape-recordings of messages that M had left on my answering machine that summer, telling me that she loved me. The only thing more phony and plastic than a ring from a gum-ball machine?

Those three words: "I love you."

I sorted mail for, oh, about five years. If you ask Charles Bukowski, the author of Post Office (Black Sparrow Press, 1971), I probably would have been better off committing suicide.

To paraphrase his book: "There was this guy, told me about jobs at the postal service? I'm still looking for that guy."

Angels Made of Ice

Did I mention it gets damned cold in Minnesota?

One day, while going into work at the downtown post office, I had seen three men standing on the front steps, in brown shirts, wearing swastika arm bands.

They were passing out literature, which they were obviously mailing as well.

This sickened me. But my job was to process and deliver the mail, not to edit the contents, right?

What disturbed me even more was that I later recognized two of those same men working inside the post office, as elevator operators. They were my co-workers.

After keying zip codes all night, while walking back home at 3 a.m., I would sometimes walk past the ice sculptures of fairies and angels on the Nicollet Mall and wonder:

What would happen if you kissed one?

Hm. I imagined I would be stuck for hours, like one of those kids who gets his tongue frozen to the monkey bars at school. The mall police might find me an hour later, and release me. Send me home embarrassed.

That idea stuck with me, because it summarized Minnesota rather neatly: If you are a skilled ice sculptor, there is hope. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993), you will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your skills and improve your talents.

If you are a postal clerk, fantasizing about slobbering on another person's work of art, you might want to reconsider your career choice -- and your social skills. It's best to look, but not touch.

For me, MInnesota was a beautiful ice angel that I could admire, but not touch.

Still, when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and I put in for a hardship transfer to Seattle in 1996, I was surprised by how much it hurt to leave the Twin Cities.

"On my last day in Minneapolis," I told her, "I thought how much I would miss all of my friends there, and I got tears in my eyes. Then, the wind started blowing. The tears froze on my eyes lashes."

"Okay!" I thought. "I'm not going to miss Minneapolis that much!"

Emerald City

I was right.

Moved to Washington State, and the Emerald City. So nice! Weird thing is, Seattle is north of Minneapolis, yet they are always green and warm there.

It rains a lot.

I worked in the photo studio at Amazon, helping them load lots of pictures of junk onto their website. Then I got a job sorting mail on the 30th floor of a tall, downtown skyscraper.

Remember the great Nisqually Earthquake of February 28, 2001? A 6.8 that felt more like a 7.2. It set that skyscraper to rockin' back and forth, back and forth. We were actually scraping the sky, which is something that skyscrapers were NEVER meant to do, and I thought: Oh hell no.

Opt: Out.

After my mother passed away, I moved back to Colorado. Worked in Denver. It was Denver. Then I moved to KC, to be closer to my mom's family. It's definitely not Denver.

Returning to Kansas

The last decade of my life can be summed up neatly by watching Bill Murray in the comedy classic Broken Flowers (2005), a painfully accurate dissection of Aging Guy angst with a wonderful soundtrack by Holly Golightly.

Her song There's An End has been my theme song for the past 20 years.

Bittersweet.

Yeah. I guess I became lost in sad movies.

But gradually, oh so gradually, I was recovering from my deep depressions, and the De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period that followed the loss of my mom.

In 2000, I had rejoined the Catholic Church, despite all the bad press it has received constantly for decades, because I thought: What does the press know? These gentle people from the Press are not exactly the most moral cats I've ever met in my entire life.

Plus I became intrigued by a simple idea:

What if the people who followed this religion for more than 2,000 years were not complete idiots? What if old granddad was not entirely wrong? What if it's our own generation of know-it-alls, who use their heads but not their hearts who have it all wrong?

What does it mean to have "a seeing heart"?

I went back to all my old notes on King Arthur and the Holy Grail cycle, watched the movie version of the DaVinci Code, and strangely found great comfort in all of the ancient art, rhythm and rituals of the Catholic Church.

The legends of the Holy Grail, the majestic beauty of cathedral choirs and the colorful illumination of stained glass -- all brought comfort to my heart. Why was this?

Because the practice of regular singing and choral harmony, in a community that holds hands, in a weekly, monthly and seasonal ritual, is the very opposite of loneliness, it's the very opposite of dissonance.

It creates harmony and order. It produces wonder. It re-enchants the world.

The Two Trees

I found, at long last, an old Celtic Druid (yet Catholic!) truth echoed in that wonderful poem by W. B. Yeats, "The Two Trees"

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. The holy tree is growing there.

The ancient pattern of sunlight on leaves is, somehow, a comfort that speaks to the heart.

In order to fulfill my mom's efforts to complete her family tree, I joined WikiTree and began entering family data onto its huge database.

And suddenly, one day, the light dawned. Here at last was a chance to go on a Grail Quest! The Grail Quest I had not completed in my youth, as a journalism student.

Was I related to any of the Grail families recently mentioned in the movie Da Vinci Code? The Sinclairs perhaps?

Could superfast supercomputers with monster databases be put to some good, an almost magical use, one that would unite humanity and not divide it? Is it possible, by doing straight genealogy and data entry, I might confirm some of the old legends about the Holy Grail and the Grail Family?

More intriguing still . . . If I built the family tree for my old sweetheart, M, was it possible that I might find a strange overlap in our family trees?

Had that strange experience of feeling a strong bond with her, back in 1988, had some basis in reality? Was that magnetic tug -- that powerful, dreamlike and mesmerizing attraction to M -- based on a much deeper reality?

Were our families secretly holding hands, somewhere far back in the distant past of our family trees?

After many months of work, I discovered answers that still surprise me.

We were indeed profoundly linked to one another, not by one but by three major Grail families: The Angevins, the Stuarts and the Sinclairs. These Gaelic French and Scottish branches of our family trees were deeply interwoven in a complex, Celtic knot stretching far, far back into the mists of time.

The "DNA Hall of Records" that I had imagined uniting us? It was not imaginary at all. It was very real. M and I share huge amounts of ancestral memory.

Short of finding the Holy Grail itself, I can tell you, these discoveries went a very long way toward healing my broken heart.

In fact, the discovery that we were cousins and part of the very same Grail family overjoyed me. It brought tears to my eyes. Tears of joy.

How to Avoid A Broken Nose

But enough about me!

Let's talk some more about WikiTree: What can it do for you?

Imagine you have reached old age (in my case not hard to imagine). Imagine you are as profoundly confused as Bill Murray by why so many things went wrong in your life, and you have received a mysterious letter from an ex-girlfriend telling you that you have a son.

Could you save yourself a lot of airfare and a great deal of driving and embarrassment (getting punched in the face by an ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend) by using genealogy?

Yes you could! In the year 2005, the year that the movie Broken Flowers was made, you still had to jet all over the country and get a broken nose to resolve the romantic puzzles and heartbreaks that troubled your old age.

Twenty years on, the question of Bill Murray's paternity, at least, could be resolved with a simple DNA swab kit and a post on WikiTree or FamilyTree. If you have a son who wants to find you, he can match on your Y-DNA, go to your WikiTree profile, see your family tree, and decide if he wants to contact you.

Done. No broken nose.

Denoument: The Sword Inverted

As for all the confusions that trouble the heart of an "over-the-hill Don Juan," I personally can testify that WikiTree and genealogy research unknotted many mysteries and cured most of my heart-aches.

First, I researched the family history of the sculptor, the man who bumped me aside, the guy that M. eventually married. Turns out he is from a family of Minnesotan Croatians strongly associated with Ante Pavelić (1869 - 1938) -- a supporter of Adolf Hitler during World War II, Pavelić served as Prime Minister of Croatia under Croatia's King Tomislav II, the Duke of Spoleto, and he ordered the execution of many Serbs and Jews.

I was greatly relieved to learn that M. divorced from this family and moved on to a brilliant career in publishing in New York. Good on her!

As for the reasons why the Croatian community in Minnesota and my own family (Ukrainian Jews) may have actively interfered with a match between me and M., you only have to look at my Dad's tree. Fierce anti-fascists and Polish "freedom fighters" who would gladly plant a dagger in the heart of anyone wearing a Swastika!

Many members of my Dad's family died in the Holocaust. Many of the members of my mom's family, German-speaking Ukrainians who were suspected by the Red Army of working for Germany, were loaded into Russian train cars and shipped eastward to Siberia. They died in labor camps.

With WikiTree's help, Everything was Illuminated. If I had gone back to their old haunts in the 1990s, to visit Kleinliebenthal or Marnienthal near Odessa, what would I have found?

Ruined houses. Empty fields.

Put simply when I proposed to M. back in 1988, what I was giving her was an engraved invitation to join a family that's a sad ruin -- an invitation that she rightly declined.

I was also proposing a marriage between families from two feuding religions, Lutherans and Catholics, who have tussled for centuries. Jewish communities fear Lutherans because Martin Luther once advocated burning down Jewish synagogues.

My father's Shernicks of Mizoch were buried in mass graves by nice Lutherans, not so very different from the nice Lutherans of Minnesota.

We were star-crossed. Though I am madly fond of M to this day, and wish her the very, very best in life, the match between our families was always awkward.

All that interference we encountered, and the loud squelching sound?

That's what happens when you try to join two families that operate on completely different political and religious wavelengths. You get disharmony and some profound emotional squelch and disturbance.

M made a reasonable decision when she decided to break things off, and so did her loving mom and dad. Happiness was not in the cards for us. I see that now.

It wasn't going to work. I finally finally finally managed to see this clearly and unknot the vexing question of "why? why? why?" when I did our family histories on WikiTree.

WikiTree clarifies. It puts your present circumstance into big-picture perspective. It made my situation crystal clear. We came from different family backgrounds -- our religions have been feuding like the Montagues and the Capulets for hundreds of years.

So, if you yourself have been through a rough ride in life, and feel deeply hurt and puzzled by some family history mystery that has always hurt your heart, WikiTree may help you. It can help you put all of your personal misfortunes into historical perspective.

WikiTree highlights patterns. When you look at the histories of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, you may be surprised to find some recurrent themes running through the fate of your own families. You are not alone -- and may not be the first star-crossed lover in your family tree.

It feels good to realize you are not alone. You are not the only one who has travelled this Lonesome Road.

WikiTree will amaze you. It's full of surprises. Guess what? I am a descendant of St. Olaf. I am a graduate of Carleton College, the cross-town rival of St. Olaf College in Northfield. But, after carefully building my family tree on WikiTree, it turns out that both of my parents are descendants of St. Olaf. I am a 30th-great grandson of St. Olaf Haraldsson (995 - 1030). D'oh! If I had been able to tell this to M and her Lutheran family, they might not have been so quick to tag me as a Catholic and discard me.

WikiTree will amuse you. It's fun. If you like writing biographies, like fixing old family photos, like writing funny anecdotes and like history mysteries, this is the perfect place for you.

WikiTree will heal you. Hugging the old WikiTree helps you heal your self-esteem, because it relates you to kings, queens and celebrities worldwide. It cures loneliness, by reminding you constantly that you are not alone! You have lots and LOTS of good family supporting you. It reunites you, potentially, with hundreds of long-lost cousins.

WikiTree will reconcile you. My lost love from college days, M? Turns out her grandmother is a descendant of the Smith and DeHaven families -- just like my grandmother. We are cousins! In fact, according to WikiTree, we are cousins many times over. We share more than 200 common ancestors.

Yes our families have been feuding for generations. But at one time they were intermarried -- which explains why they are flinging crockery at each other with so much gusto.

WikiTree proves you are cousins. I can now happily love and adore M, not as my wife, but as a distant cousin, a dear cousin of whom I am especially fond (when she isn't throwing teapots at me). WikiTree has put us back into right relationship to one another. I am happy to be in a real and very realistic relationship with her -- one that does not necessarily require us to live under the same roof. I need not fear being rejected by her: we will always be cousins.

Friends is a Seven-Letter Word

WikiTree affirms your underlying unity with all of humanity. It can also reaffirm your unity with a specific individual -- someone you lost long ago -- as well. M is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. M's DNA is literally in my blood like holy wine -- we are united exactly as I had always hoped we would be. Thanks to WikiTree, I now know for a fact that our families have been conjoined by holy matrimony for centuries -- and, knowing this, we can still be united as friends.

M and I are literally Friends -- both of our trees are blessed by a very strong community of Quakers -- the Religious Society of Friends established in Ireland by George Fox about 1651.

Our Irish Quaker families were holding hands for more than a century in Pennsylvania.

Mischief managed! She's my beloved cousin M and she always will be. I have God's permission to love her forever, and I carry a little of her in my heart wherever I go.

The Hands of Time

Finally, WikiTree will magnify your spirit.

Your life may be small, but it was definitely designed with a purpose. It's NOT a mistake. It's a single thread in a much, much, much larger tapestry -- a beautiful design being hand-woven by the Fates.

The hand of Fate is sometimes cruel. It may cut you off and separate you from loved ones suddenly and unexpectedly. But it does not make errors. It does savagely beautiful work.

Look at WikiTree! You will begin to understand this: Your life may be hell at present, and you may be nowhere near where you wanted to be in life. You may no longer have the people you wanted to have in your life. Your life may not have ended as you wanted it to end.

But we as individuals cannot boss around the Fates. All we can do is trust that we are now exactly where we were meant to be and where we need to be, then try to make the very best of our situation.

Be an optimist, and it will all turn out exactly as it was meant to end.

Life is often extremely confusing and hurtful, but it is never without purpose.

Knowing this helps you relax, helps you lighten up. You begin to trust the hands of Fate, even if you don't always understand their strange work, what they are doing to you or why they are doing it.

Learning to trust the skilled hands of Fate might even teach you to forgive other people with a full and grateful heart. "Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do."

M certainly had no idea what she was getting into when she decided to go out with me, right?

My girlfriend dumped me, and I was very angry with her and miserable for many years. But in retrospect: She did exactly the right thing. Did she really have a choice?

A Grail maiden of excellence, she did exactly as bidden by God, regardless of all the pain to herself, regardless of all the tears it cost her. I admire her for that.

Just look at the Big Picture results: Our lives have turned out so beautifully. Exactly as they were meant to be. She has her glamorous career in publishing in New York, the life she always wanted, and I have my less glamorous but equally satisfactory life in Kansas City, pursuing a quiet and bookish life as a Grail Quester who gets to write small but colorful biographies and profile interesting people for WikiTree.

We're exactly where we want to be. We became what we always secretly wanted to become.

The Strange Secret

In the movie Groundhog Day (1993), the character Rita (played by Andie McDowell) reads a poem to Phil, the arrogant weather man. It's from Sir Walter Scott's poem "Breathes There The Man," and the excerpt goes like this:

“High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim. Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”

By the end of the movie, Phil has learned his lesson. He has become much less self-centered. He has become "other oriented," looks for ways to help his community, and finally recognizes on a personal level a truth that enivornmentalists have always taught us in more scientific terms:

There is no such thing as an organism inside an enviornment. There is, rather, an organism-hyphen-enviornment, because the organism and its environment are one and the same thing. They depend on each other.

Extending this concept to the analogy of a gardener in a garden, Phil reaches the final scenes of the film reading a poem in bed, next to Rita. He reads the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer:

"I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree."

As Rita falls asleep on Phil's shoulder, Phil says "I think the last line you heard was 'Only God can make a tree.' "

This is one of the loveliest moments in film history, and it is the thought I would like to leave you.

Plant a seed, like the seed of a tree, and it will become a tree. Give it rich soil, and watch over it patiently. Become a constant gardener.

God will do the rest. You need to leave it in God's hands. Because only God can make a tree.

A good husbandman plans the garden carefully, plants carefully, waters and weeds carefully, provides nourishment and all the protections the plants may need, protects his vineyard, and shares the fruit of his bounteous harvest gladly with the entire community.

Because, in the end, it's all a gift.

The garden that results is a gift from God. We do not make the miracles happen, we simply provide a good, clean and carefully planned environment that encourages those miracles to happen.

This is the secret of success. To quote that wonderful movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon:

If you want your dreams to be, you must build them slowly. Day by day and step by step. Simple joys are holy.

When the details of life vex you, take a step back and look at the Big Picture. Look at WikiTree.

There are no mistakes in life! It's exactly as if some large, planetary intelligence, far beyond all human understanding and control, were working steadily -- with purpose-directed attention -- at weaving a tapestry, with infinite attention to every detail.

Why that planetary intelligence is using LSD is still a deep mystery to me. I am also mystified by why it takes so long, sometimes, to see the wonderful little touches that fate once added to our lives.

Now that I am an old man, listening to the ancient tape recordings of phone messages that M once left me -- in the long-ago summer of 1988 -- I am no longer tortured in the least by the sound of her voice.

On the contrary, I am touched. Because I can finally hear all the love in her voice -- the love that really was there.

When I look at the old snapshot of her smiling, rubbing noses with her dog, Gunji? it makes me smile too.

Wistful for a lost summer vacation from long ago. And also enormously, infinitely grateful for those moments in time -- and the love that is still there.

Yup. The artist who made that picture does fantastic work. It helps that he had such a beautiful subject to work with.

All of that beauty? It's still out there, in time. Like starlight -- travelling through infinity.

Knowing this undoes that knot in your heart. You may have lost a loved one. Tragically, your paths may never, ever cross again. Yet, still, can you not see the beauty in it?

Keep your chin up, kid. Stay in the picture. Trust in the hands of Time.

Et sois bien sage, d'accord?

A List of My Revolutionary War Ancestors

In preparation for the 2026 celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution (the United States' Semiquincentennial), I have compiled the following (incomplete) list of the ancestors in my family tree who fought in the American Revolution.

From paternal grandfather Albert Shernick's family tree:

• None.
• Note: Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746 - 1817) is a Polish general who served in the American Revolution, and he is very distantly related to my paternal grandfather, Albert Shernick, by marriage. Surprisingly, Wikitree's Connection Finder tool shows 34 degrees via marriage.

From paternal grandmother Mildred Belle Shaw's family tree:

Mildred Bell Shaw is a direct lineal descendant from the following veterans of the American Revolution:

• John Perry, who served as a Private in the Sixth Regiment of New York Militia, raised in Dutchess County under the command of Col. Morris Graham, Col. Roswell Hopkins, and Lt. Col. Jacob Griffin.
• John Perry married to Rebecca Ross, who may be related to Betsy Ross, but Rebecca's lineage is not known.
• Rowland Perry, the father of John Perry, enlisted in the 16th Regiment of New York Militia, raised in Albany County. Much more research is needed.
• Phineas Barber, an ancestor of Mildred's grandfather Simon D. Perry, served as a private with the Sussex County New Jersey Militia under Col. Matthias Shipman. He fought at the Battle of Long Island and the Battle of White Plains. He was wounded in action at the Battle of Ft. Lee. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A134504
• Capt. Hendrick (Henry) Mandeville served with the 14th Regiment of New York Militia, raised under Col. John Knickerbacker and Lt. Col. John van Rensselaer in Albany County. The DAR register indicates Hendrick served as a Justice of the Peace at Pompton Plains, Morris County, New Jersey. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A073318

From maternal grandfather Lawrence Michael Gabriel's family tree:

Lawrence Gabriel's paternal line stems from an old French family in Alsace-Lorraine. But his maternal line were old-school Pennsy Deutsch -- Quakers and Mennonite farmers from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Their lineage stretches back to the time of the American Revolution, and Buddy descends from at least five ancestors who fought in the revolution:

• Martin Ulrich, who served as a Private in the 2nd Company of the 2nd Battalion of Pennsylvania Militia, raised in Lancaster County under Capt. Michael Holderbaum and Lt. Col. Thomas Edwards. He is listed as DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A202653

• Owen Hughes,, who served as a private in the 1st and 5th Battalions of the Philadelphia County Militia, under Capt. Benjamin Weaver's 6th Company and Capt. Daniel Springer's 1st Co. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A059232

• Capt. James McClure, who served in the Chester County Pennsylvania Militia under Col. William Montgomery and Lt. Col. Thomas Bull. He was taken a Prisoner of War. He is DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A075266

• Private William Armfield Sr., who served for one day. Armfield was a Quaker. During the Revolutionary War his farm was raided by the British. "As a result he announced to his wife Mary that he was going to search for game so that his family might eat. He joined Greene's army and was assigned to Joe Lovett's company where he fought all day. [Battle of Guilford Courthouse 15 Mar 1781]. After a day in battle he reached home worn and weary. When Mary asked him where his game was, he replied that "the game I had killed was not worth bringing home." William went back to farming -- and he provided a steady supply of much-needed food to the troops. He is DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A003041.

• Sgt. Nathaniel F. Cunningham, who served in 1775 as a Private in Capt. Ballard's Regiment of the 1st Virginia Line, and served in 1776 as a Private in Capt. John Morton's company in the 4th Virginia Regiment. In 1776 Nathaniel was transferred from the 4th Virginia into Gen. George Washington's personal Life Guards Regiment, where he defended the Commander-in-Chief. Nathaniel was one of 180 to 250 men posted to the headquarters security detachment at Valley Forge. He served with the Life Guard for two years and advanced to the rank of Sergeant. During the last years of the war he re-upped with the 1st Virginia Line and fought in the Carolinas. Nathaniel Cunningham is DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A028651.

Based on these ancestral records, Buddy Gabriel's male descendants may easily qualify to be Sons of the American Revolution. His daughters and their female descendants may qualify to be Daughters of the American Revolution.

From maternal grandmother Bernice Mary Libel's family tree:

Bernice Gabriel's descendants may qualify to be Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution several times over. That's because Bernice herself was a direct descendant of several revolutionary ancestors, namely:

• Sgt. Isaac Smith Jr., who served in the Culpeper County Virginia militia and Continental troops. His record was approved for SAR Membership #72008, and appears in the D.A.R. Pariot Index, Volume 1, page 626. But DAR has put a hold on his file. They want additional proofs. Isaac Smith Jr. is listed as DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A105613

• Isaac Smith Sr., who allegedly served with his local militia, but DAR has noted that applicants must prove his service (his records are confused with those of his son, Isaac Smith Jr.) DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A105611

• Matthew French, who served as a Private in the Montgomery County Virginia militia under Capt. Cloyd and fought at the Battle of Wetzell's Mill and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #042489

• Peter Dingess, who served as a Private under Capt. Mairs in the Montgomery County Virginia Militia. He fought in the Battle of Point Pleasant with Gen. Lewis and served as an Artilleryman in Col. Trigg's Battalion, Lafayette's Corps, at the Battle of Yorktown. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A032270. NSSAR ANCESTOR #P-148360.

• Col. Martin Armstrong Jr., who served as an officer of the Surry, North Carolina militia. He played a role in the War of the Regulation (1770) and the Battle of Alamance, NC (May 16, 1771). He became a Captain in the Surry County militia in 1773 and during the war saw action at Moore's Creek Bridge (1776), in the Rutherford Expedition (1776), at the Battles of Little Lynches Creek (1780), and at the Battle of Camden (1780). He led a Rifle Company at the Battle of New Garden Meeting House (1781) and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (1780). DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A003147.

• George Poff, who served as a Private, 1st Battalion, York County Pennsylvania Militia under Capt. Michael Kauffelt. This profile needs clean up. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A202844

• Jesse Hall, who served as a Private in the 1st New York Continental Line. He first enlisted on 3 February 1776 with the Dutchess County New York Militia under Capt. Nathan Pierce as part of the 3rd New York Regiment. This regiment was later attached to Colonel Richmore's 1st Continental Line, under Gen. Alexander MacDougal's Brigade. Jesse fought in the Battle of Long Island (1776) and the Battle of White Plains (1776). In 1777 Jesse and his brother Asa Hall re-enlisted and served as privates in Col. Morris Graham's NY Regiment of Levies, Capt. Isaac Vail's Company of Dutchess and Ulster Co. Militia. At the Battle of Bemis Heights (2nd Saratoga), their Company served in Brigadier Gen. John Glover's Brigade under Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln's Division (on the right wing of the battleline). In response to the Cherry Valley Massacre of November 1778 Jesse's Regiment was sent by Gen. Clinton to Ft. Stanwix under command of Col. Peter Gansevoort, to suppress a Mohawk rebellion at Ticonderoga. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A049723.

• Jeremiah Pate Sr., who served in the Montgomery County Virginia Militia as part of Capt. Daniel Trigg's Battalion. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A08868

• Capt. Jeremiah Pate Jr., who served with the Bedford County Virginia Militia. He fought at the Battle of Point Pleasant, 10 October 1774, and later in May of 1781 served as Captain in a force of Virgina Militia marched by Capt. Adam Clements from Bedford County to the assistance of Gen. Greene in South Carolina. DAR PATRIOT ANCESTOR #A088611

Why I Love WikiTree

WikiTree has given me something priceless that many people in society strongly desire: An interesting pedigree, full of princes and paupers, knights and knaves, inventors and dissenters, poets and pirates, runaway slaves, mayors and mobsters, butchers and bakers, several successful candystick makers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, saints and sinners and girls whose dark eyes could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

Have I mentioned Tsars and kings? The royalty thing?

All of my relationships to royalty shown here are fairly solid: Not made up by me! I found them easily with WikiTree.

WikiTree is a community effort to build a family tree for the entire world, the entire human race. It demonstrates that we all share a common human bond: The trunk of The World Tree.

A surprising result of this effort: I no longer self-identify as "white" or "American." I simply call myself human. Best to be humble.

WikiTree will make you humble.

After all, if God is "a line of infinite length whose center is everywhere," then the person sitting opposite me on the train really could be the center of the universe, which is exactly where one would expect to find God sitting, cleverly disguised.

It certainly pays not to use color-coding, stereotypes, and ugly racial epithets when addressing God, right? It's better for one's own health.

WikiTree confirms this: The notion that human races and nations are somehow completely separate from each other is simply false. It's an illusion.

To paraphrase a quote once found scrawled on the wall of the underground tunnels that criss-cross the Carleton campus: "Life is just biology, biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, physics is just mathematics, mathematics is just philosophy, and philosophy is bullshit."

What we are staring at, when we regard our family tree, is the ancient philosophical problem of The One and the Many. The puzzle is, how can so many millions of unique and extremely different people ever be united? What common ground unites them?

The answer is: D'oh! The Earth, obviously. Nature. Reality. The environment. Our shared "common ground" is the Real World. The dog that bites, the bee that stings, and all those damned mosquitos that Henry David Thoreau never mentioned when he was busy BS-ing about Walden Pond and how beautiful it is to live in a log cabin without indoor plumbing.

Reality is real and solid and the very opposite of BS. The real world is the way things truly are. The real world is the common ground we all share upon which all BS "theories of everything" are built, right?

That's what unites all people on Earth into a single family: Our common interest in the Earth and its environment.

But the problem is: We can't get our minds around the whole planet, so we try to get our minds around itty-bitty chunks of it (states and nations, populated by separate races with different languages), which requires theorizing that all these people are somehow held together by some kind of magical invisible duct tape ("brotherhood" or "sisterhood" or the family discount deal on Netflix) but we can't seem to find enough duct tape at Wal-Mart to stop world wars from breaking out, and so our theory that the whole human race can somehow be taped together into one big happy family falls apart and starts to look a lot like, well, yeah, BS.

Yet philosophers insist: The illusion of separation is simply an illusion. Everyone who has read the Bhagavad Gita knows this. Ditto the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim religion.

"Hear, oh Israel, the Lord thy God is One!"

One single life force moves us all.

We're talking about wave theory, baby. The 8 billion leaves on a tree may seem to be separate, but when the wind starts blowing, they wave, and wave and wave. Altogether. In unison. Because a single, invisible, overpowering spirit moves them, and all 8 billion leaves are united by a single tree trunk.

From many ancestors and many roots, one world tree grows, and it fathers forth every day into many leaves of many shapes, sizes and different colors.

The ancient Greek philosophers understood this fathering forth of the World Tree to be exactly like the universal geometry of a single point (a seed) fathering forth within the matrix into many two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes: a line, a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, etc.

Polygons? Honey, Polly is not just gone, she's going to town!

The invisible rules that govern this geometry are universal: The same rules of mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry and biology apply on Mars, Venus, Jupiter or any planet you might choose to visit in the universe.

Yet the magic of geometry creates unique shapes that are very peculiar to this Earth, this century, this decade, this year, and this particular point in time. Geometry creates an almost infinite variety of forms that are peculiar and unique.

This cosmos is split into a giga-billion-trillion-ga-zillion peculiar particles of individuality, yet when moved by a strong wind (a wave propagating in space) they move in harmony and unison: As if invisibly guided and united by a central conductor's invisible hand, a united chorus sings from the same sheet music with a single spirit and a single voice.

E pluribus, unum. From the many, one.

The many and diverse varieties of people in our united states and united kingdoms are entirely separate and peculiar unto themselves, yet they are shaped and informed by universal rules of geometry and physics and a moving breath of invisible spirit that magically unites them as a whole.

It is not militant uniformity that unites us. We do not need fascists to bind us together like a bundle of identical sticks. We are secretly united by the moving breath of an invisible, godlike spirit that unites us all, as if with one body, into a unified whole.

Watch an entire baseball stadium full of people doing "the wave," and you get the idea. We are completely separate, but when the spirit moves us, we are completely capable of working in perfect unison.

Our unity arises naturally from the field of nature itself, like the wind blowing through a Big Tree. The amazing diversity of the World Tree gives an illusion of separation. Yet we share a common field, a common trunk, a common set of branches, and an invisible set of physical and geometrical rules that govern all of us.

Therefore, when it comes to family history, I've begun to embrace exactly the definition of Homo sapiens that my biology teacher taught to me in high school: Homo sapiens is a single race called the human race, and there are no sub-species within the human race.

The appearance of being separate from other people, both past and present, is simply an illusion

WikiTree proves this: We're all connected to each other in one big happy and wavy family tree.

Put another way: Every flavor of ice cream in a shop full of 31 flavors shares one thing in common: It's all ice cream.

There may be strong arguments over which is the "best" or yummiest flavor in the world, but at the end of the day: It's all ice cream, dude! Why are you whining? Be happy that you are in an ice cream shop with so many flavors!

Recombinant DNA and the fabric of human flesh are so complexly interwoven that there is really no point in trying to sub-sort people into three black-tan-white skin buckets. seven ROYGBIV buckets, one dozen nation buckets or hundreds of language buckets.

Every human is unique. Every person is a unicorn. We are living on a planet populated by more than 8 billion unicorns, and unicorns would seem to be a dime a dozen. But when you look at them closely, the notion that all unicorns are alike vanishes.

Examine the unicorns in the tapestry carefully, and you will realize with a shock that, even within the set of all 8 billion unicorns, each unicorn is different from all the others. Each unicorn is unique.

Do you realize what that means? To be a unique unicorn? Do you have any idea what that means?

Wait for it . . .

We're all virgins.

Seriously. WikiTree taught me this: There will never be another you.

You can replicate, and replicate, and replicate, and even try to clone your DNA, but in this strange tapestry that is the Space-Time continuum, there will never be another you.

Anyone who tries to replicate you is going to bungle the job: Guaranteed.

Junior isn't senior. Your "mini me" is slightly off. Your child is only half you and kinda like you, You can never really copy yourself perfectly, because even a perfect clone is going to be brought up differently, by different people, at a different location in Space-Time, and the results are going to be -- urrr, kinda different.

You are a unique, non-reproducible masterpiece. Which makes you EXTREMELY valuable and priceless. You are one of a kind. One out of 8 billion. Extremely rare.

Are you human? Then you're a unique member of my human family, and I deeply respect you. But keep your hands off my f-ing unicorn!

Some things are sacred, and holy, untouchable and deserving of complete and nearly infinite respect. The World Tree is one of them, and the magical apple or fruit that grows from that World Tree is another.

So Rule No. 1: Keep your hand off my unicorn, my masterpiece the sacred mystery that is me. And the second rule is like unto the first: keep your hands off my virgin daughter, the apple of my eye, my one and only offspring.

This is the basic paradox at the heart of all attempts at human replication, and reproduction: In so far as we are interested in SELF-replication and SELF-reproduction, we would almost prefer our offspring to be like Pallas Athena, the virgin daughter who lept, fully formed, from the mind of Zeus.

People with very strong egos want a perfect mini-me and an exact replica: Narcissists want no other person involved at all in the process of self-replication. They would almost wish for some form of self-mapping or Parthenogenesis (virgin birth) to take place, not to go 50-50 with a person of the opposite gender, or a different race, who requires them to mix or "adulterate" their bloodline with lots of foreign or strange DNA.

The original parents (the father especially) tend to be control freaks, because what narcissists want is a perfect "mini me" and when they find some species of surfer banging away on their teenage daughter they get mighty angry.

Put another way: Think of my virgin daughter as a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that belongs to Mick Jagger.

Your eyes get big. and she's exactly what you've always secretly wanted -- which is exactly why you can't have her! You know you are going to get your hand slapped if you even touch the hood ornament.. You can almost hear Mick yelling, "Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!"

So whoever came up with that image of young Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Paradise, drooling over an apple while a huffy puffy Big Daddy stands in the background looking mighty angry got it right. We have many WikiTree profile managers guarding their work far more jealously than Mick Jagger ever guarded his Silver Cloud.

Who wouldn't get upset to discover the fruit of one's hard labor being pawed thoughtlessly by ignorant children with sticky fingers? God, Mick and I share one goal, and we have but one humble request: Please don't smudge the mirror of our family history with sticky fingers.

Do not touch. And if you must touch, then please wash your hands carefully beforehand, and do your family edits to the world tree lightly, lightly and with beauty. Take great care.

Think of Wikitree as a mirror held up to the face of the whole human race: a beautifully woven tapestry of unicorns.

It took enormous amounts of effort to make this masterpiece. If you look at that tapestry and all you see is the color of an individual figure's skin, then you have entirely missed the extremely clever and amazing "intersectionality" of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of strands of culture that went into that one person's creation.

It is this amazingly detailed intersectionality that makes our planet-sized tapestry of humanity a wonderful and extremely clever work of art. The number of strands of DNA that go into weaving a single human being is mind-boggling. Utterly amazing.

This is why, I think, everyone loves the Saturday Night Live video on YouTube of The Rev. Jesse Jackson reading the poem "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss. Nobody likes to be crudely color coded or treated like a cartoon.

We prefer 3D, please, thank you very much. 4D or even 5D, if you think you can manage it.

Nor does anyone really like to hear the highly-complex, harmonic convergence of the many cultures, languages and traditions that went into making our family name reduced to a single color or a racial slur.

Seriously? That's all you see or hear when you look at me and hear my name? You don't hear an entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir of ancestors singing like angels in the background?

WikiTree is the perfect antidote to ignorant people who try to poison your thoughts by using only black-and-white color buckets, or people who treat you like a stereotyped cartoon. If you are feeling hurt or angry or down, because you have been verbally abused by a racist, you can always go back to WikiTree and stare at this gigantic Wall of Worth that is your family tree.

You can see the amazing tapestry of human diversity on full display, and watch it grow while more than 1 million WikiTree members busily work on honoring that diversity.

Sigh. It makes me so happy. To my utter amazement: WikiTree has restored my faith in human beings.

Another surprising result of WikiTree's community effort: If you want to relate yourself to princes, as well as paupers, then you may do so. The links are all there.

Because the World Tree is one big, unified tree, that means you are not only related to the lower castes of society but also, without any doubt, directly related to the higher castes of human society.

I personally remember the time I first saw an English king pop up in my family tree. It's like watching a mouse stand up in your soup. I was shocked and not entirely certain that I was happy to see him there.

I am still not certain I'm happy to have any royalty in my family tree at all: They are embarrassing. When you read their history, you'd almost rather have Billy The Kid or Wild Bill Hickock up there in the attic, bumping around.

But it certainly puts into perspective very quickly what we mean by aristocracy: Are they really the best? In many ways you are much luckier to be related to your Auntie Griselda, who is famous within the family for her fantastic molasses cookies.

For what it's worth: WikiTree will quickly make it possible for you to demonstrate that you have royal, aristocratic and noble ancestors in your family tree -- just like everyone else.

The kings and queens shown here are permanent fixtures in the trunk of the World Tree - the worldwide pedigree of the human race. All that differs in my own particular family tree is my peculiar and unique path of descent from ancient ancestors shared by millions of other people.

Indeed, we are ALL descendants of royalty, and the reason for this is almost purely mathematical.

Everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. The number of your ancestors rapidly increases as you go back in time. In fact there are about four generations per century and the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation back.

Do the math. The formula is the number 2 to the power n, where n = the number of generations back. The number of your ancestors grows exponentially as you travel back in time. But the population of the Earth rapidly shrinks.

If you go back 20 generations, or about 500 years, to the year 1500 A.D., you will have 1 million ancestors. Go back 30 generations, another 250 years, to the year 1250, and you will have 1 billion ancestors.

Yet the total human population of planet Earth in the year 1250 A.D. has been estimated at 500 million. The number of ancestors you MUST have, 1 billion, is twice the actual population of the Earth.

By the time you have gone back 1000 years (about 40 generations), how many ancestors will you have? The formula says 2 to the 40th power, and if you try to calculate that number . . . your calculator will melt.

The number is huge. It far exceeds the entire population of the Earth in the year 1000. But these are ancestors you MUST have.

In other words, the mathematical probability that you are related to any one person who lived on or before the year 1250 is good, and the chance you are related to a person who lived before 1000 A.D. is astronomically great.

The category of "people who lived prior to the year 1000" definitely includes kings, queens, saints, villains and some very colorful characters indeed.

Genealogy is simply the gentle art of tracing your exact path back to those fascinating people. It's a hobby everyone can enjoy, because EVERYONE has an amazing family tree.

WikiTree proves it.

How to View Family Connections

Within WikiTree, one may explore family connections to this or any other profile by following these simple steps:

1. From within the profile page, click on the Ancestors button to view the person's pedigree, then click on any link that interests you
2. If you are a WikiTree member, sign in and you may explore your own family connections further by going to the "My WikiTree" tab and using the drop-down menu to select "Connections," or by using the Family Tree & Tools tab.
3. Those who are not WikiTree members may still use all the main tools, namely:

• The Ancestor Explorer app,
• The Fan Chart app, or
• The Relationship Finder app.

Explore some really cool WikiTree Apps

Anyone and their dog can use the long list of amazing WikiTree applications built by independent developers. See the list at the "Help:Apps" page here.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Apps

Want to carry the entire toolkit with you on your cell phone or laptop? Simply click the hyperlink above and save the "Help:Apps" page link to your Favorites. When you want to use the tool kit, just go to your Favorites, pull up the "Help:Apps" page and click on the button for the specific WikiTree app you want to use. The button will take you directly to the app.

Within these apps, I most often use the Relationship Finder tool and the Ancestor Explorer tool. Again, these powerful tools are completely available to the public, and you don't even need to be a member of WikiTree to use them. You don't have to be signed in. All you need are the WikiTree IDs of the people you are comparing and exploring.

Within Relationship Finder, one may use the person's WikiTree ID (in my case Shernick-1) to find family links or connections to the WikiTree ID of any other person on WikiTree.

How to Find A WikiTree ID

How do you find someone's WikiTree ID? Simple: Use the WikiTree Family Tree Search engine.

Example: You want to see if writer Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) is related to the great English poet, John Donne. First you load Dominick Dunne's name into the Family Tree Search engine and hit the green SEARCH button to search. You can easily find him among the search results. Just click on his hyperlinked name and his WikiTree profile pops up.

When his WikiTree page pops up, look up at the top of the page for its web address. You should see: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Dunne-565

The Dunne-565 part is his WikiTree ID.

If you aren't logged into WikiTree, how do you find Dominick Dunne's WikiTree ID? Simple. Just use Google. Google "Dominick Dunne" + WikiTree. After pulling up his WikiTree page, look up at the hyperlinked address for his profile page. Once again, it's https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Dunne-565, and the Dunne-565 part is his WikiTree ID.

Be sure to write it down: Dunne-565. It's the key to all his WikiTree tools.

How do you find the famous poet John Donne's WikiTree ID?

Well, so many people have been named John Dunne or John Donne over the past 2000 years, that you had best go to Wikipedia first, to grab the famous poet's birth and death dates. Simple reference to Wikipedia tells you that you want the John Donne who lived from 1572 to 1631.

Google "John Donne 1631 WikiTree" and Google itself will pull up his WikiTree profile link. Click on the link, confirm you've got the WikiTree profile page for the right person and look at the hyperlink address field at the top of the page. It's https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Donne-48, so the famous poet John Donne's WikiTree ID must be Donne-48.

Be sure to write it down: Donne-48.

Now you are set to use WikiTree's extremely powerful data base to explore their family trees. You can use the Ancestor Explorer app to delve deeply into the ancestors of either man (all you need is one WikiTree ID to use the Ancestor Explorer).

Or you can use the Relationship Finder app to explore all of the deeply hidden family relations that connect these two very different people (the Relationship Finder requires two WikiTree IDs).

Are they connected by marriage or related by a common ancestor? Now that you have both WikiTree IDs you can find out very easily!

If you forgot to save the Relationship Finder tool to your Favorites, there is an easy way to fish it up. Go way way way down to the bottom of any person's WikiTree profile page and click on the dark green "More Genealogy Tools Button." This pulls up the person's pedigree, and way down beneath the pedigree illustration you will find a long list of WikiTree "Genealogy Research" tools.

Go to tool number four, the CONNECTIONS tool.

To find a relationship by blood (a list of all commonly shared ancestors) click on the Relationship Finder hyperlink.

Load the two WikiTree IDs, Dunne-525 and Donne-48, into the Relationship Finder Search Engine and hit the FIND RELATIONSHIP button.

Result: No relationship found. No common ancestor found on WikiTree. BUT note that you are now automatically offered a hyperlink that allows you to explore Connections by marriage.

Click the Connections link. Result: "Dominick Dunne is 19 Degrees from John Donne." By 19 degrees, we mean 19 steps, or 19 people, away from each other, following a zig-zag path through the World Tree.

At the bottom of the illustration, click on the Alternate View: Generational Path button for a very clear graphic representation of their zig-zag relationship. The results can be amazing!

Are Your Parents Related to Each Other?

Because WikiTree's superfast search engine can take any two people and tell you in a split second if they are related and how they are related, an obvious question arises: Are your own two parents related? The answer can be surprising.

In my case, I discovered that my father and mother do indeed share 112 common ancestors. That is, their family trees overlap in 112 places over a period of 30 generations, according to WikiTree's Relationship Finder Tool. Technically speaking, when one looks at their closest relationship, they are ninth cousins once removed.

By "ninth" cousin we mean that you start with their parents and have to go nine generations back before you find their first common ancestor. If they were first cousins (still legal in parts of Alabama and the Darwin family!) you start with their parents and only have to go one generation back.

In other words, if you load Charles Darwin (WikiTree ID Darwin-15) and his wife Emma Wedgwood (WikiTree ID Wedgwood-33) into the Relationship Finder you discover, um . . . .

Moving right along, what do we mean by ninth cousins "once removed"? We mean that, in order to find the most recent common ancestor shared between these two people, you have to go back nine generations from the first person's parents and then 9 generations back from the second person's grand parents.

In other words, the triangle leading back to the shared ancestor is a bit lop-sided, or one generation "off" -- one side of the triangle is 9 generations and the other side is 9 + 1 generations or "once removed."

See the nifty and colorful "Cousins Chart" from FamilySearch.org for a better visual demonstration.

When you think about it, exploring the ancestors shared by your parents is not only scary, it's fascinating. Sometimes mind boggling.

Example? Using the Relationship Finder tool on the WikiTree IDs for my parents I discovered that my father and mother share a famous mutual ancestor: They both descend from Sir Thomas Grey (1455 - 1501), a Knight of the Garter and Knight of Bath. Sir Thomas was the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville (1437 - 1492) by her first husband, Sir John Grey (1432 - 1461), the 7th Lord Ferrers. who died at the second Battle of St. Albans.

Elizabeth Woodville married secondly to King Edward IV of England, on 1 May 1464, and she thus became the Queen of England. In other words, my parents both descend from the famous "White Queen," who played a central role in the War of the Roses. She belonged to the House of York, which was represented by the White Rose, as opposed to the House of Lancaster, which was represented by a Red Rose.

For an illustrated summary of the Wars of the Roses see HW Issue 23 at Archive.org.

Elizabeth Woodville's Wikipedia article indicates that she has been portrayed in several popular books and films. Notably, she was portrayed recently by actress Rebecca Ferguson in the BBC Television series The White Queen (2013), which was based on Philippa Gregory's historical novels. and by Essie Davis in The White Princess (2017), an eight-episode sequel that appeared on the Starz movie channel.

As Queen consort, Elizabeth Woodville gave King Edward IV several children, including Edward V of England (b. 1470) and his brother, Richard, Duke of York (b. 1473), better known as the two Princes in the Tower.

My parents, in other words, are both descendants from an elder step-brother to the two young Princes who were deposed (murdered) ca. 1483 by King Richard III. Had Sir Thomas Grey been murdered as well, my paternal and maternal families would not exist.

The bloody history of King Richard III may be found in All About History Issue 122 here.

National Public Radio recently retold the story of how King Richard III's bones were re-discovered in 2013, beneath a busy English car park (a parking lot) in the city of Leicester. The identity of his remains were confirmed with ancestral DNA.

Explore Further: The More Genealogy Tools Menu

1. Click the ANCESTOR EXPLORER Link > Enter the WikiTree ID (in my case, Shernick-1) > Set the Number of Generations Back to 20 > Select the List Type (For example, choose "American Revolution" to list all my ancestors tagged as participating in the American Revolution) > Click on the GENERATE LIST button > Wait patiently for about three minutes (I have about 22 ancestors in this category, and it takes time to load) > View the listed results and click on their hyperlinks to explore individual profiles, or > Click the "Map Links" button, which shows each ancestor as an icon on a Google map, or > Download the entire list as a PDF for later use (the PDF preserves the hyperlinks).
2. Cursor down, down, down the list of Genealogy Tool options to the FAN CHART app. This button allow you to generate a very neat and downloadable image of any family tree on WikiTree, so long as you know the WikiTree ID. Then,
3. Continue scrolling downward until you get to the Relationship Finder hyperlink, and (looking within that block of text) click on the hyperlink that says RELATIONSHIP FINDER QUICK LINKS. This will take you to a fun page that allows you to quickly and automatically check any WikiTree ID (in my case Shernick-1) against dozens of famous people and heads of state, including Presidents and Prime Ministers.
4. For an overview of my own family's connections to famous cousins and royalty, I've done most of the searching for you. Simply read the overview below.

Find Your Famous Ancestors and Cousins

Want to find your own relationship to famous people? After you have logged into WikiTree and created a family tree, WikiTree makes finding connections to notorious people a cinch with the Featured Connections page here. In the upper right hand corner you will see a "My Connections" button, and all you have to do is click to load the entire list. It will automatically run the entire list of Featured people against your own WikiTree ID, and generate a list of your famous ancestors and cousins in less than a minute.

Alternatively, you can click on any of the subcategory headings on the Featured Connections Subcategories page, and once the subcategory page loads you will also find a "My Connections" button on the upper right-hand corner of each new sub-category page.

For example, if you click on the hyperlink to NASA Astronauts, it takes you to the NASA Astronauts subcategory page here. By clicking on the "My Connections" button, you get two lists.

The first list is a list of your NASA Astronaut cousins (Astronauts related to you by blood or consanguinity). The second list is a list of NASA Astronauts "connected" to you by marriage or "degrees of separation" (not necessarily related to you by direct descent or DNA). Both lists are fun to explore!

For example, one of my distant cousins, connected by marriage only, is the singer Joan Baez. She is connected in a very lateral and sideways manner to the famous Astor family (extremely wealthy New Yorkers), and to my great surprise the Astor family trace their lineage vertically (through several generations) to my mother's Armstrong relatives. Jaw dropping! And I might never have discovered my relationship to the famous Astor family had I not been exploring a strange and lateral "Connection" to Joan Baez.

The Connection Finder search engine opens up many, many strange and hidden connections you might never have dreamt up in a hundred years.

By going to the Connection Finder tool and then clicking on the Featured Connections tab, one may easily generate and discover a long, long list of hyperlinked connections to any WikiTree ID. Exploring that long list can take weeks and months.

Here, for example, is a long list of some of the famous ancestors and people who are supposedly my distant, distant cousins by "consanguinity" (via common ancestors shared from 15 to 48 generations ago). You can see immediately that these are very distant relatives, yet it contains some surprising and fun connections worth exploring:

• 16 generations John Hancock III (1737-1793)
• 17 generations George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876)
• 17 generations Pete Rose Sr
• 18 generations Peter V. Seeger (1919-2014)
• 19 generations Hōhepine (Te Wake) Cooper (1895-1994)
• 19 generations Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) [aka Mark Twain]
• 19 generations Michael Douglas
• 21 generations Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (1895-1966)
• 21 generations George Brinton McClellan (1826-1885)
• 21 generations Lucille Desiree Ball (1911-1989)
• 22 generations Amelia Mary Earhart (1897-abt.1937)
• 22 generations John Lithgow
• 23 generations Edward Plantagenet (abt.1239-1307) [King Edward I]
• 23 generations Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) [aka Lewis Carroll]
• 24 generations Gillian Anderson [aka "Agent Scully" from the X-Files]
• 24 generations Mickey Charles Mantle (1931-1995)
• 26 generations Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
• 26 generations William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
• 27 generations Richard (Plantagenet) of England (1157-1199)
• 27 generations Louis Dieudonné (Bourbon) de France (1638-1715)
• 27 generations Maria Antonia (Habsburg-Lothringen) d'Autriche (1755-1793) aka Marie Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XIV
• 27 generations Francis Lightfoot Lee (1734-1797)
• 28 generations William Lamb (1779-1848)
• 29 generations Ambrose Powell Hill Jr. (1825-1865)
• 30 generations Ludwig Otto Friedrich W. (Wittelsbach) von Bayern (1845-1886)
• 31 generations Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief (1925-2013)
• 32 generations William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)
• 32 generations Norvell Hardy (1892-1957)
• 32 generations Charles Grey KG (1764-1845)
• 32 generations Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels-Greifenstein-Hungen (1651-1724)
• 34 generations Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-1909)
• 34 generations Dolly Parton
• 38 generations Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967)

Celebrity Genealogy: Boosting into the Stratosphere with FamousKin.com

Have you discovered FamousKin.com yet?

If not, I would STRONGLY urge you to avoid this website until you have two hours free to spend, because this relational data base is fun, super-fast, super-slick, and highly addictive!

Built by Rick Hall, a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, FamousKin.com is "a free genealogical website devoted to discovering family connections of famous people to each other."

The concept is elegant and powerful: Create a menu with two dozen tabs, each tab being a group of famous people to whom you might wish you were related; then populate each of these categories with a hundred celebrity profiles, in alphabetical order by surname, giving each celebrity their own thumbnail photo.

The amazing part: Rick has already built a complete family tree for each celebrity, and each pedigree is very professionally done.

This man is a genealogy rock star.

By each thumbnail, Rick parks only two buttons: "Famous Kin" and "Family Tree." The first gives a long line of famous relatives (the list is only thumbnail photos). The second button instantly provides a pedigree, and a professionally cited sources page for that pedigree.

For example, if you go to the TV/ Film/Stage menu, choose the actress Lucille Ball and click the "FamousKin" button, BOOM. There's a long and fascinating row of celebrity mug shots of Lucy's famous kin. They are lined up in a neat row like face cards.

But what is their relationship to Lucy?

Click on any one of those faces, and the database shows that person's exact connection to Lucille Ball.

Example: One of Lucy's Famous Kin is King Edward I. Click on Fast Eddy's face-button, and up pops a chart informing you that Lucille Ball is a 21st-great granddaughter to King Edward and showing the exact line of descent, from King Edward I down to Lucille Ball.

https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-chart.php?name=4017+lucille+ball&kin=3697+edward+i

You can download this descendancy chart by simply clicking the PDF button on the right side. For any one of the relatives standing between Edward and Lucy, if you click on their name the hyperlink takes you to a simple, no-frills family group page with an official source neatly cited at the foot of the page.

FamousKin is doing exactly what WikiTree does: Using a huge relational data base to quickly discover hidden lines of relationship.

But unlike the profiles on WikiTree, which carry tons of text, the profiles on FamousKin are merely mug shots with a name and description underneath, so Rick's database sorts extremely quickly. It's super fast! Like a professional dealer at a casino expertly sorting and dealing face cards

You don't get a shred of biography on any profile, but the underlying genealogy itself is rock solid, Rick's done all the homework for you, and the sourcing is a real godsend for WikiTreers who want sourcing help fast.

I therefore enthusiastically suggest pairing FamousKin.com with WikiTree.

Using FamousKin.com to Find "Gateway" Ancestors"

I'll give an example of what I mean by pairing Famous kin.com with WikiTree.

Say that I have already traced my family back to Charlemagne. Now, Charlemagne has thousands, and thousands of descendants, and some of those modern-day descendants are celebrities. Am I distantly related to some unknown celebrity cousins via Charlemagne?

Using FamousKin.com's name search engine, I enter "Charlemagne" and guess what I get? Look at the results here:

https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-menu.php?name=4143+charlemagne

Hundreds of very famous people descend from Charlemagne, and FamousKin.com lists those celebrities in a split second. I have just discovered a hundred distant celebrity cousins, including Princess Diana, Prince Harry, Tony Dow and Justin Bieber!

What if I have NO relationship to King Charlemagne? How can Famous kin.com help me? Answer: By pointing me to some "Gateway Ancestors."

The list of Charlemagne's celebrity descendants above is also a long list of viable gateways to Charlemagne's family tree. You may not be able to plug yourself into Charlemagne's family tree via Justin Bieber (who is a very recent offspring), but the long list of Charlie's descendants also includes many celebrities born in the 19th, 18th, 17th, and 16th Centuries.

Do any of those descendants of Charlemagne have surnames that match surnames in you own tree? Then you suddenly know exactly which branch you want to work on hardest! Work hard on that branch, and you may strike on a line that leads straight back to Charlemagne.

As a fast and well-researched database, Famous kin.com is truly a treasure trove of gateway ancestors. It's not just fun, it's an extremely useful tool.

The only problem I had with Rick Hall's website was this: It took me a while to discover that he had parked the main menu as a drop-down menu under the three-bars tool icon in the upper right-hand corner. Once you discover this hidden main menu, the website is much easier to use, because the celebrities are neatly categorized.

The celebrity categories which Rick has fully populated include: Presidents, TV/Film/Stage, Mayflower, Witchcraft, Royalty, Signers, Historical, Great Migration, Jamestown, Magna Carta, Infamous, Literary, Political, Music, Inventors, Spies, Military, Artists, Fashion, Business, First Ladies, Vice Presidents, Governors, Space, Sports and Germanna.

Watch Intrepid Explorers Face the Unknown on the "Finding Your Roots" TV Show

Frustrated because you were an orphan, or adopted, or have zero celebrities in your family tree? No worries! Have I got a toolbox to drop on you in the next section!

But first, if you are in the "frustrated to tears" category, I want to encourage you to watch one of my favorite TV shows: "Finding Your Roots" on PBS.

Now going on its ninth season, "Finding Your Roots" is always enjoyable and it constantly reminds you that even film and TV celebrities may face brick walls when trying to trace their family trees. If you are a frustrated orphan or foster child, you have some very famous people sitting with you in the same boat.

It is a rare person indeed who does not find at least one "Titanic Disaster" that left a gaping hole 🕳️ n their family tree.

In every episode of this show, Henry Louis Gates Jr , a professor at Harvard, helps people summon the courage to face that dark and often scary mystery of their family's unknown history. They explore the knowledge gap by sending in a crack team of genealogy detectives, who always come back with interesting results.

See the Wikipedia List of "Finding Your Roots" episodes here.

Guest celebrities on the show have included Branford Marcellus, Barbara Walters, Samuel Jackson, Condoleeza Rice, Margaret Cho, Stephen King, Aaron Sanchez, Alan Dershowitz, Deepak Chopra, George Stephanopoulos, Jessica Alba, and many many more.

If you are like me you will come away from these fascinating excursions into the past thinking 1. "Well I am glad the skeletons in my family's past were not dug up on national TV, in front of an audience of millions!" and 2. "Wow! With enough brainpower, know-how and lots of travel money, just about any family history mystery can be solved."

Please watch at least three episodes, and you will realize you are definitely not alone when it comes to facing brick walls, and if you are looking for help, there are some amazing genealogy resources out there, and people who really can work miracles.

One of those miracle people is you.

FamilySearch.org and the portal to Narnia at the back of your wardrobe

I'm now going to drop a heavy toolkit on your head.

That is, I am going to point you toward some websites and tools that you simply must use, if you want to explore family history on your own. With this kit, you can find many lost relatives and most of the hidden "Easter Eggs" in your branch of the World Tree all by yourself.

Why? Because we don't all have a Harvard professor and a crack team of genealogy detectives to solve the family puzzles for us, do we?

Also, to hook up with WikiTree's "world tree," we need to do the research on about five generations all by ourselves. It takes about that many generations before you can start plugging your own branch into the big World Tree built by a million other genealogists.

While family history is a wonderful excuse for taking luxury vacations all over the world, let's face it: If you're a war orphan, it's probably best not to go back to the war zone you came from, and most of us don't have the time or budget to just jet off to Kiev every weekend to use their library catalog while missiles explode all around us.

If you have a limited budget, don't despair. You will find, if you rummage around in your closet, that you have everything you need: A toothbrush, a library card, and a talent for typing with your thumbs.

The tooth brush is so you can smile at your local librarian while asking whether they offer Ancestry.com library edition? You may be surprised to learn that Ancestry.com generously grants free access to its otherwise expensive database at public libraries all over the world.

If your library offers free internet terminals and subscribes to Ancestry "library edition" then in a matter of minutes they may have you typing your library card number into the proper launch screen, and you will suddenly enter into a Narnia-like wonderland of almost infinite genealogical records gathered from archives all over the Earth.

I'm not making this up: You don't have to jet out to Kiev and get yourself shot to get your hands on foreign birth, marriage and death records. You may get them all for free at your local library by using Ancestry "Library Edition."

If your library does not offer a free library edition of Ancestry.com, you still have a friend in Family search.org, an absolutely free family history website.

In fact, in many ways the vast treasure trove of world genealogy resources that Family search.org offers is even better than Ancestry.com's collection.

Again, it's absolutely free.

For basic training, see more than 188 free classes on their RootsTech video page here

https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/library?cid=em-rt-15306&mkt_tok=NTkwLUJVSy03MjYAAAGKvKxuwIDvD42o7V-uERQY_VC4jBFl8xE_EUSYfJ4R4f_I6BjDdVo6RLJsmnMi0JK_-efu6qln2trLp9AqycLA9YMuE4b5Dq2aqICF2Pl0

To get a global, worldwide overview of the deep, deep, deep collection of nearly infinite resources offered at FamilySearch.org, see their clickable World Map here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page

From this clickable World Map, you can literally click on any continent, then any country, then any state, county or city you want, and at each level there is a neatly ordered "Wiki" page of free, hyperlinked resources.

This is quite simply THE best family history research guide in the world, and it's all free.

Explore Surnames and DNA online with Linkpendium.com

The World Map of FamilySearch records, linked above, may be fairly useless if you have only a surname and no idea where in the world your ancestor was living. In that case, you may want to use Linkpendium.com at first

Linkpendium.com does one thing, and does it well: It aggregates. It snorfs up genealogy information all over the internet, and neatly presents the results as hyperlinks to the websites found

For example, Go to Google's search engine, type in "Smith Family" + Linkpendium, hit Enter, and you'll get useful results fast.

The first results group will be a general summary titled "Smith Family Trees, Crests, Genealogy, DNA, more" followed by several more Smith family aggregations, each cluster sorted by state.

The DNA links appended are especially helpful. In fact, when you pull up the results for the Smith family, which is an absolutely huge family with a very common name, the very first category of results to pounce is the section titled "DNA Project."

There are two reasons you'll want to jump on DNA links like a duck diving on a June bug.

The first is because these links will usually bring up a Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) website, in this case a link titled "Smith Surname at FamilyTreeDNA."

The second is because these FTDNA websites post PDF spreadsheets, the results of hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of careful Y-DNA testing, and you don't have to pay a dime to view those results: You just need to know where to find the link.

Linkpendium tells you exactly where to find the Family Tree DNA results for any surname under the sun.

Why would you want to pounce a boring spreadsheet? Because that surname spreadsheet, my friend, is all Y-DNA validated.

If the main question you are asking (within the context of "Smiths") is "Which one of you ornery Smith boys is my Daddy?" then what you want is the Y-DNA spread sheet. Because Y-DNA is what scientists use to prove paternity.

Beneath the generic surname Smith lies a very wide rainbow-like spectrum of males named Smith with very different Y-DNA. The Y-DNA spread sheets or ["Smith DNA Projects"] published and put online were put out there for exactly this reason: To help sort out all the Smith boys.

Smith cousins are trying very carefully to untangle and validate their family trees. Using only their FTDNA kit numbers (to preserve their privacy) they can now prove, scientifically, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that great grandpa Barney Smith had such-and-such a haplogroup. If you don't have the very same haplogroup, then you ain't no descendant of Barney Smith!

Conversely: If your last name is Jones and you grew up in a British orphanage, were fostered out to three different families, and your FamilyTree DNA test came back showing a very strong match to American Smiths from Bluefield, West Virginia, well, welcome to WikiTree!

It's an international tree, and this is a great place to start the search for your birth father. See Adoption Angels - Basic Search Help for more on how to find help reuniting with biological family.

How is this going to help you, if you are a female Smith descendant, or a Smith who has not tested his own Y-DNA yet?

Well no one said you have to get tested, sweet stuff! You are welcome to use WikiTree simply as a learning tool. That's where WikiTree and its Surname studies and DNA pages come in.

This is a great website for learning the basics of genetic genealogy and DNA matching.

Dial up the name Smith on WikiTree, and you will find it already has a Smith Name Study group going.

See CATEGORY: SMITH NAME STUDY.

This category has several sub-category groups going, including a Smith DNA study group, who fully utilize WikiTree's DNA pages and DNA matching tools to compare DNA, and make sure they don't add to Barney Smith's tree a "brother" named Snuffy Smith whose Y-DNA does not match.

What this means is, as an anonymous member of the public you are free to look at all the Smith FamilyTreeDNA test results, listen to the Smith study comments posted, and even quietly match your own DNA with the DNA posted on WikiTree.

But you are not required to test, or to share, or to post your own DNA at all. You are definitely welcome to sit in and benefit from the lively discussion on DNA matching, without participating or paying a dime.

That is one of the public benefits of WikiTree.

Out of Africa: All Haplogroups Lead Back to Africa

If you have ever used one of the popular DNA kits offered by 23andMe or FamilyTreeDNA, then you've probably run into the term "haplogroup" before: It's just a fancy word for saying "your DNA relatives" or the group of people who have genetic markers most similar to your own.

See the Wikipedia article "Haplogroup" here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

Notice the colorful world map showing the migration patterns of Y-DNA haplogroups all over the world?

All Y-DNA starts in eastern Africa with "Y-DNA Adam" and his impossi-hot wife "Mitochondrial Eve."

In other words, genetic scientists think the entire human race began in eastern Africa.

The entire human race has African ancestry. There is no such thing as a human without African ancestry.

Explore Your African Heritage

Africa is the Earth's second-largest continent, with a population of 1.4 billion people (2021). It contains more than 54 sovereign countries and territories, with 1200 to 3000 different languages and tribal dialects spoken.

If you want to find the full menu for WikiTree projects in the continent of Africa (including all countries within Africa), then you go to the "Category" level. That is, you go to Google and search on the term "Category:Africa" plus WikiTree. Results:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Africa

This takes you to a menu of 96 sub-categories, all dealing with Africa and its individual countries.

Explore Your African-American Heritage

The best place to start exploring WikiTree's list of famous and notable people is the Featured Connections Page.

For Black Heritage the overview page is

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:US_Black_Heritage_Project.

For notable African Americans, try Category: African-American, Notables at

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:African-American_Notables.

Try also the subcategory 100 Greatest African Americans. Click on the "My Connections" button in the upper right-hand corner.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections.

Next go to the Ancestors Explorer page. Enter your WikiTree ID or someone else's WikiTree ID. For example, President Barack Obama's WikiTree ID is Obama-2. Enter the number of generations back (usually 25). From the List Criteria option choose Biotext. When prompted for the term to search, you may choose any term you desire. For example you may choose the term "slave" if you want to find out if President Obama has any ancestors who were slaves or slave owners.

Select the optional display filters. Hit enter and wait patiently (two or three minutes) for results. For Obama -2, there are more than a dozen results. Based on the texts of Wills contained in their biographies, President Obama had several ancestors who were slaves. He also had ancestors from Virginia who were slave owners.

Subcategory: Asante's 100 Famous African Americans

Take a good look at my profile photo. I am clearly whiter than sour cream, and I used to self-identity as white.

But guess what? If you go to the WikiTree Featured Connection "Asante's List of Top 100 Notable African Americans," and pop my WikiTree ID (Shernick-1) into the search engine, then hit Enter, WikiTree finds dozens and dozens and dozens of ancient ancestors whom I share in common with America's most famous African Americans.

I can claim with pride that I am a distant cousin to:

• Halle Berry
• Harriet Tubman
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Marian Anderson
• Mohammed Ali (aka Cassius Clay)
• The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and
• Langston Hughes.

In other words, one may think of oneself as white, or black, or Asian, or Aboriginal, but those simplistic categories become meaningless on WikiTree.

Show me a person who thinks they are "pure-blooded" or 100% anything, and I will show you someone who probably has not traced their family tree any further back than four generations.

WikiTree may trace you family tree as far back as 40 generations. Going back that far means you are going to find connections that you did not think existed. You were wrong. These connections do exist.

The results are surprising. They underscore what historian Eleanor Zelliot calls the vast interconnectedness of everything to everything.

Explore Your North American Native Heritage

The aboriginal peoples of North and South America and the North American tribes are very definitely under-represented by WikiTree,

A list of Native American Tribes may be found at the Legends of America website here.

A list of Notable Native Americans on the Frontier may be found here.

See also the list of Native American Heroes and Leaders here.

These key ancestors are most easily searched by simply loading their names into Google and adding the term "WikiTree" to see if they have a WikiTree profile. If they don't, please build one!

On WikiTree itself, individual profile pages may be dialed up by following these links:

Native Americans Project

• Apache Team
• Choctaw Team
• Cherokee Team
• Navajo Team - a completely blank page and the saddest page on WikiTree
• Shawnee Team
• Sioux Team

Explore Your Spanish, Mexican and South American Heritage

For 14 Hispanic genealogy websites that will help you with research, see:

https://www.heritagediscovered.com/blog/14-useful-free-resources-for-hispanic-genealogy

.A good overview of Spanish resources available through WikiTree may be found under the heading Category:Spain.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Spain

To see if you have famous relatives in modern or ancient Spain, go to Category: Notables, Spain and click on the "My Connections" button.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Spain%2C_Notables

To find famous relatives from modern or ancient Mexico, go to Category: Notables, Mexico and click on the "My Connections" button.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Mexico%2C_Notables

To find famous relatives from the region of South America, see the WikiTree Category: South America, here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:South_America

Within the 30 sub-categories listed, try Category:South America, Notables and click on the "My Connections" button here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:South_America%2C_Notables

On this Notables menu, you can actually drill down into the notable people from several South American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Sadly, WikiTree offers very few Featured Connections to people of Central and South American descent. Go to the Featured Connections page. Among the sub-categories, select Latin America, Featured Connections. Results: Only two profiles. Is that sad or what? Obviously WikiTree needs to do a much better job with South American family history in general.

WikiTree's Ancestor Explorer tool is definitely helpful for automated searches. Go to the Ancestors Explorer page. In the WikiTree ID field, enter your own ID or the ID of a famous person. For example, Cesar Chavez, whose WikiTree ID is Chavez-1101. Enter number of ancestors back = 25.

Choose among the following List Types:

• Spanish Monarchs
• Mexican-American War
• European Aristocrats
• European Monarchs
• American Immigrants, or
• Bio Text [any text of interest that might be in the biography]

Choose filters. Hit "Generate List" and wait patiently for two or three minutes. Searching Chavez-1101 against Spanish Monarchs gives zero results. Running his ID against "American Immigrants" picks up four of the immigrant ancestors of Cesar Chavez.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections. Or you can enter the WikiTree ID of Cesar Chavez to see if he has any relatives who were also famous Civil Rights activists.

Chavez has zero Spanish Monarchs in his family tree, because his tree has not been taken back very far. Guess who does have Spanish Monarchs in his family tree? Windsor-21, aka King Charles III, because Charles is royal and he has a family tree that goes back to the Middle Ages. It takes 20 minutes for the Ancestor Explorer engine to churn through such a big tree and finally spit out results.

My own ID, Shernick-1, was spit out much faster. Ancestor Explorer said I am related to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, the monarchs who sent Christopher Columbus to America in 1492.

List of Lineage Societies at Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides a very handy list of lineage societies, A to Z, at this link:

List of Hereditary and Lineage Organizations.

Please note the very important distinction Wikipedia makes between lineage societies and ethnic heritage groups: A lineage society traces the descendants of a handful of interesting people, like all the Pilgrims who arrived on board the ship Mayflower, or all the people who founded Jamestowne, Virginia.

Because the people in that boat, or joining that colony, may have been extremely different, in terms of their ethnic heritage, a lineage society does not necessarily assume a shared or identical ethnic heritage.

The language, culture, DNA and ethnic heritage of the thousands of soldiers who participated in the American Revolution, for example, may have been very, very different indeed.

A lineage society is not necessarily the same as an ethnic heritage group.

Descent from a single person, however, such as Pocahontas or a King of England, certainly may imply shared DNA and a shared ethnic heritage.

Example: Descendants of Pocahontas

Pocahontas was an Algonquin princess who married to an English colonist and travelled to England. Her descendants count themselves amongst the First Families of Virginia.

Yet several Algonquin tribal historians have claimed that Pocahontas was married within her own tribe before she was carried off by the English settler John Rolfe. They are more interested in tracing her native descendants than her descendants by Rolfe.

The family tree of Pocahontas and John Rolfe is outlined by David Moremus at the Pocahontas Descendants website here.

Among the lines of descent are a group called the "blue Bollings."

See The Bolling Family Association here.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections.

Example: Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent

A good example of a lineage society that does not necessarily imply shared DNA or a shared language and culture is the Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent (established 1867 in Philadelphia).

This lineage society requires only 1) that you be an American citizen, and 2) that you demonstrate royal descent, from a King or Queen of any country.

See their webpage here:

Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent

Featured Royalty: How to Find Royal Family Fast

If the search methods described above sound slow and clumsy, you're right. There's a much faster way to find the royal ancestors and cousins in your family tree.

The fast way to find links to royalty is very simple on WikiTree: You just go to the Category: Featured Connections page. Scanning through the menu of options you will notice two yummy items: Category: Featured Royalty and Category: Scottish Royalty.

Go to the Category: Featured Royalty page here and click on the My Connections Button. This will quickly generate a long list of hyperlinked connections to international royal ancestors and cousins, and those who are direct relatives will be highlighted with the word "Ancestor" next to them.

By printing out this results page as a PDF, the hyperlinks are preserved and I can come back to the entire list and explore my royal cousins much more carefully later.

Using the Category: Featured Royalty list, my ancient royals marked "Ancestor" include:

• King Edward I (Plantagenet) of England
• King Louis IX (Capet) of France, aka St. Louis
• Queen Alienor of Aquitaine
• King Guillaume Normandie (aka William the Conqueror)
• King Brian Boruma (aka Brian Boru, the famous Irish King)
• King Valdemar den Store (aka Valdemar I of Denmark)
• King Konrad de Burgogne (aka Conrad I of Burgundy, France)
• King Harold Godwinson of Wessex (aka King Harold II of England)
• King Otto Liudofinger (aka King Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor)
• King Aelfred of Wessex, and
• King Karolus Magnus, aka Charles the Great or Charlemagne

One big problem with the Featured Royalty List is that your WikiTree ID has been run against a list of international royal WikiTree IDs selected at random by an unknown editor. It's not a complete list! Nowhere on this list does King Edward III appear. Nor does this list show my family's relationship to the House of Stewart.

As we have demonstrated clearly above, deliberately running your WikiTree ID against a carefully chosen king or queen may result in better results. Using the "automated list" method above provides some very, very interesting results fast, but the "Featured Royalty List" used also contains big, big gaps.

If I want to see Scottish Royalty, I need to go back up to the Category: Featured Connections menu level and scan the options more carefully. Bingo! Connections to the Stewart Family are hidden under Category: Scottish Royalty.

When I go to that subcategory page and click on the "My Connections" button, I quickly get an amazingly detailed list which includes lots of Stewart ancestors and cousins. When this list of Scottish Royalty is matched against my WikiTree ID, it generates a long list of ancestors: A total of 16 Scottish kings are highlighted as "Ancestors," going all the way back to Kenneth MacAlpin (810 - 858 A.D.).

I print out this long list as a PDF (which preserves the hyperlinks) and I have just saved myself a ton of work. I am a very happy camper indeed!

But there is one small problem: One must remember that this Scottish Royalty List skips over the nobility. For example, it skips entirely the Scottish lords and Barons who signed the Declaration of Arbroath.

The Older the Better: Descent from Ancient Royalty

Remember how we calculated the number of ancestors one MUST have in the year 1000 A.D., and how huge that number was?

Well what this huge number means, in practical terms, is that you are very, very probably related to ancient celebrities, such as Viking warriors, Celtic Saints or Merovingian Kings of France. In other words, the older the better: The further you go back in time, the greater the chance you are related to that famous person.

If we look at kings, for example, the chances that you are related to a very ancient king like Charlemagne or William the Conqueror are much, much better than the chance that you descend from a more recent king or queen, like Queen Victoria.

Example: Descent from Charlemagne

As luck would have it, proving one's descent from an ancient king like Charlemagne or William the Conqueror is also considered very desirable amongst English snobs.

So let's take a look at how ridiculous this snobbery is by using WikiTree to prove that even a slob like Mark Shernick, once he has plugged his family tree into the World Tree, can trace his lineage all the way back to Charlemagne.

First, who was Charlemagne?

For a free and colorful history of Charlemagne, who has been called "The Father of Europe," see the downloadable copy of All About History Issue 13 at Archive.org.

Anyone who has done a detailed family tree on WikiTree may attempt to trace their lineage to Charlemagne (748 - 814), WikiTree ID Carolingian-77, the founder of the Carolingian Dynasty (the early kings of the Holy Roman Empire).

For additional background, see All About History Issue 58 The Holy Roman Empire, the royal lineage that eventually became the Hapsburg Dynasty.

The WikiTree Relationship Finder says that my own profile has more than 100,000 paths back to Charlemagne. My paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw, has 77,946 paths back to Charlemagne.

For example, here is just one of the paths. Granny is supposedly a 32nd great -granddaughter of Charlemagne through this direct line of descent:

32nd great granddaughter:

• 1. Mildred is the daughter of Violet Belle (Perry) Shaw (1883-1967)
• 2. Violet is the daughter of Cora Belle (Stoddard) Long (1863-1955)
• 3. Cora is the daughter of Francisco Marion Stoddard (abt.1828-abt.1912)
• 4. Francisco is the son of William Stoddard (abt.1784-1854)
• 5. William is the son of Ruth (Needham) Stoddard (1756-)
• 6. Ruth is the daughter of Daniel Needham Jr. (1729-aft.1790)
• 7. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1703-1803)
• 8. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1679-1719)
• 9. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1638-1717)
• 10. Daniel is the son of Edmund Needham (abt.1606-1677)
• 11. Edmund is the son of John Needham (1575-bef.1660)
• 12. John is the son of Robert Needham Esq (1535-bef.1603)
• 13. Robert is the son of Anne (Talbot) Needham (abt.1515-1565)
• 14. Anne is the daughter of John Talbot (1485-1549)
• 15. John is the son of Gilbert Talbot KG (1452-1517)
• 16. Gilbert is the son of Elizabeth (Butler) Talbot (1420-1473)
• 17. Elizabeth is the daughter of Joan (Beauchamp) Butler (abt.1396-1430)
• 18. Joan is the daughter of William (Beauchamp) de Beauchamp KG (abt.1343-1411)
• 19. William is the son of Katherine (Mortimer) de Beauchamp (abt.1314-abt.1369)
• 20. Katherine is the daughter of Joan (Geneville) de Mortimer (1286-1356)
• 21. Joan is the daughter of Piers (Geneville) de Geneville (abt.1255-bef.1292)
• 22. Piers is the son of Geoffrey (Joinville) de Geneville Knt (abt.1226-1314)
• 23. Geoffrey is the son of Simon (Joinville) de Joinville (abt.1190-1233)
• 24. Simon is the son of Helvis (Dampierre) Joinville (1145-1195)
• 25. Helvis is the daughter of Helvide (Vaudemont) Dampierre (1105-1165)
• 26. Helvide is the daughter of André (Vaudemont) Baudemont (1060-abt.1142)
• 27. André is the son of Hildouin (Montdidier) de Montdidier (abt.1010-1063)
• 28. Hildouin is the son of Hildouin (Montdidier) de Montdidier (abt.0980-1037)
• 29. Hildouin is the son of Helvide (Laon) Montdidier (0940-)
• 30. Helvide is the daughter of Roger (Laon) de Laon (aft.0890-0942)
• 31. Roger is the son of Heilwig (Friuli) di Friuli (aft.0836-aft.0895)
• 32. Heilwig is the daughter of Gisela (Carolingian) di Friuli (abt.0819-aft.0874)
• 33. Gisela is the daughter of Hludowic (Carolingian) of France (abt.0778-0840)
• 34. Hludowic is the son of Charlemagne Carolingian (abt.0748-0814)

This makes Charlemagne the 32nd great grandfather of Mildred, my grandmother.

Thus WikiTree makes it amazingly easy for Mark Shernick to go from slob to snob. All I had to do was to link my family tree to other families, going about five generations back, and WikiTree made the rest suprisingly easy.

Lineage Society: Order of the Crown of Charlemagne

If you are a descendant of this illustrious 9th-Century King, you may be eligible to join the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States:

https://charlemagne.org/

Lineage Society: Order of the Merovingian Dynasty

Formed in 1984, the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty looks like an exclusive club for fans of the Davinci Code and popular books on the Holy Grail.

But if you've proven your descent from Charlemagne, joining this lineage society should be a cinch, because Charlemagne is a direct, lineal descendant of the Salic Kings of France (Merovingians), who lived in the 5th Century.

For their strange history, see the webpage for the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty here:

http://merovingiandynasty.org/details.php?id=history#:~:text=The%20Order%20of%20the%20Merovingian%20Dynasty%20%28OMD%29%20was,records%20for%20and%20thus%20can%20develop%20lineages%20from.

Example: Descent from King Edward III

DNA is obviously the best way to match oneself with royal ancestors.

But first, to see if there is even a vague chance that I descend from a King of England, all I have to do is log into my WikiTree account and go to my own profile, Shernick-1. When my profile loads, I can click on the Family Tree & Tools Tab, and when that page loads I scroll way down to the ANCESTOR EXPLORER app mentioned above.

Clicking on the Ancestor Explorer link brings up the Ancestor Explorer search engine, with my WikiTree ID, Shernick-1, pre-loaded into the "WikiTree ID of Descendant" box. For "number of Ancestor generations back" I set the options to the maximum, 20. Under the "List Type/Criteria" box I then search the drop down menu and select the option "English Monarchs - Ancestors Who Were English Monarchs" and I hit the "Generate List" button.

WikiTree's database chews on the question for about three minutes and turns up the following list of English Monarchs connected to my WikiTree ID during the past 20 generations (about 500 years): 0.

Hm. That means zero English Kings connected to my WikiTree ID within the last 500 years. Should I give up? Heck no! English kings stretch back for more than a thousand years, and the mathematical chances that I am related to an ancient king are actually pretty good.

I take a different tack. I decide to go to the WikiTree profiles for famous medieval Kings of England (more than 20 generations back) and then, on their profiles pages, I will use the drop down menu under their WikiTree ID to search FORWARD for a "Relationship to Me."

That means I can go as far back in time as I want and the search engine is now saving lots of time by making a straight shot FORWARD in time to see if there is any direct relationship to any one of my direct ancestors.

Take for example King Edward the III, who lived in the 14th Century. What name does he hide under on WikiTree? If I Google the term "King Edward III + WikiTree" I find the result I want: He's hiding under the name "Edward (Plantagenet) of England (1312 - 1377)." I click on the hyperlink to pull up King Edward III's profile page.

Now all I have to do is use my mouse to hover over his WikiTree ID, Plantagenet-70, and sure enough, there's a drop down menu. At the very bottom of the menu is the option I want: "Relationship to Me." I click on the "Relationship to Me" button and voila! I find a direct line of descent to my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw.

Another approach would be to land on King Edward III's profile page, then click on the "Family Tree & Tools" tab for his profile. Scrolling way down, below his pedigree, to the WikiTree Tool menu, I look at the "Connections to Me" tool and within that block of text I select "Relationship Finder." With one click, it auto-loads King Edward III's ID into one box, Plantagenet-70, and my ID, Shernick-1, and gives a result in seconds: I am King Edward III's 19th-great grandson through my paternal grandmother Mildred Belle Shaw.

Surprisingly, beneath the lineage, I see a text message:

"Explore more: 12 different paths were found between Edward and Mark."

Using the drop down arrow, I discover that there is another path through my maternal grandmother, Bernice Libel. When I click on this I discover that I am a 20th grandson of King Edward III through Bernice. There is also a second (alternative) path from Edward to grandma Bernie that makes me King Edward III's 19th great-grandson, and this lineage leads through several ancestors named Stewart - members of the Stewart dynasty.

Conclusion: My family's strongest claim to direct descent from an English King is through the lineage of my maternal grandmother, Bernice (Libel) Gabriel. Bernice is allegedly a 17th great-granddaughter of King Edward III (1312 - 1377), a member of the House of Plantagenet.

For a colorful, free and downloadable summary of the British monarchy, see All About History Issue 2, British Royals at Archive.org. Edward III is featured on p. 46 here.

Note that Bernice claims descent through King Edward III's son, John of Gaunt (1340 - 1399), a Knight of the Garter and leading member of the House of Lancaster (represented by the Red Rose in the War of Roses).

The path of ascent from of Bernice (Libel) Gabriel to King Edward III through the Stewart family and Edward's son, John of Gaunt, looks like this:

17th great granddaughter:

• 1. Bernie is the daughter of Effie Frances (Smith) Libel (1891-1963)
• 2. Effie is the daughter of Isaac Albert B. Smith (1849-1914)
• 3. Isaac Albert is the son of Theodore George Smith (1825-1879)
• 4. Theodore is the son of Elizabeth (Hinchman) Smith (1799-1854)
• 5. Elizabeth is the daughter of Mary Ann (Perry) Hinchman (1775-1832)
• 6. Mary is the daughter of Elizabeth (McClung) Perry (abt.1757-abt.1798)
• 7. Elizabeth is the daughter of Rebecca (Stuart) McClung (1710-1781)
• 8. Rebecca is the daughter of Andrew Stewart (1672-1715) DNA confirmed
• 9. Andrew is the son of Robert Stewart (abt.1640-1686)
• 10. Robert is the son of Robert Stewart (bef.1629-1662)
• 11. Robert is the son of Andrew (Stuart) Stewart (1560-1629)
• 12. Andrew is the son of Margaret (Stewart) Stewart of Methven (abt.1539-1627)
• 13. Margaret is the daughter of Janet (Stewart) Stewart Lady Ruthven (1505-1566)
• 14. Janet is the daughter of John (Stewart) Stewart Second Earl of Atholl (aft.1475-abt.1521)
• 15. John is the son of John (Stewart) Stewart of Balveny First Earl of Atholl (abt.1440-1512)
• 16. John is the son of Joan (Beaufort) Queen Dowager of Scots (abt.1402-abt.1445)
• 17. Joan is the daughter of John Beaufort KG (abt.1371-1410)
• 18. John is the son of John (Plantagenet) of Gaunt KG (abt.1340-1399)
• 19. John is the son of Edward (Plantagenet) of England (1312-1377)

This supposedly makes King Edward III the 17th great-grandfather of Bernice and the 19th great-grandfather of Mark Shernick. This path was discovered with incredible ease by WikiTree. It just took some persistence and only an half hour of searching.

The hard part, of course, is verifying and documenting every single link in the lineage. To join a lineage group like The Plantagenet Society (established at Philadelphia in 1902) requires impeccable documentation. Even a single error could break the connection entirely.

But this is a great start!

Example: Descent from the House of Stewart

In the last section we saw that my grandmother Bernice can trace a path of ascent from her ancestors in Virginia to the House of Stewart, and from the House of Stewart to King Edward III, the House of Plantagenet.

This makes sense if you know the history of Virginia during the 1600s. During the English Civil War (1642 - 1651) the Stewart family fought hard to retain the throne of England, and they lost. Their supporters, known as Cavaliers, fled to Virginia in the New World, or they were transported to Virginia involuntarily as prisoners.

Either way, a large number of Stewarts and Stewart supporters landed in Virginia, and my maternal grandmother Bernice apparently descends from a branch of Virginia Cavaliers who had a very respectable pedigree indeed. She descends from a line of Stewarts who fled first to Ireland and lived for many years at Stewart Castle in Newtownstewart, County Tyrone.

An obvious question arises: Is it possible that Bernice can trace her lineage to some of the Stewart kings of Scotland?

To find out, we go to Bernice's profile, Libel-1, and use the same methods described above. Clicking on her profile's Family Tree & Tools tab, we go to the Ancestor Explorer search engine, set the number of generations back to the max (20), and in the "Select List Type" box we select a different option: Scottish Monarchs.

When we hit the "Generate List" button, we discover that Bernice actually has five ancestors within 20 generations who meet the criteria for Scottish Monarchs:

1. James Stewart (1430 - 1460), aka King James II of Scots
2. James Stewart (1394 - 1437), aka King James I of Scots, who married to Joan Beaufort (1402 - 1445), the granddaughter of John of Gaunt and great-granddaughter of King Edward III of England (above)
3. John Stewart (1337 - 1406), aka King Robert III of Scots, the father of King James I of Scots,
4. Robert Stewart (1316 - 1390), aka King Robert II of Scots, the founder of the Stewart dynasty and the father of King Robert III
5. Robert Bruce (1274 - 1329), Earl of Carrick and Lord of Annandale, better known as "Robert The Bruce," grandfather of King Robert II of Scots through his daughter Marjorie Bruce and her husband, Walter Stewart.

To learn more about these cats, we go to Archive.org and search the metadata with three simple letters: AAH. That pulls up all sorts of free and illustrated histories in the beautiful All About History (AAH) series, and within the results we spot an issue that looks like exactly what we want: AAH Issue 136 The Stuarts.

A close perusal of the contents, however, tells us that this is the story of the last Stuarts under King James II of England -- the story of the English Civil War during the 1600s.

For a peek at the early Stuarts of Scotland, there's a better option: AAH Issue 79 Royal Dynasties. An overview of the House of Stuart begins on page 38, and an illustrated pedigree may be found here.

But this takes us back only to King James IV of Scots. For the earliest Stewarts, then, we must turn to the House of Stuart pedigree provided by Wikipedia here, which cross-links nicely with articles on each individual king.

Again, this is a great start for anyone who wants a basic and cursory overview. The hard part will be proving every link in the lineage, with solid primary documentation. Of particular concern are those undocumented patches in Ireland and Virginia, all of which need to be confirmed and documented carefully.

Luckily, there are lineage societies that are happy to help with the research, including the Royal Stuart Society at royalstuartsociety.com and Stewart Society at stewartsociety.org, which offers a magazine, clan gatherings and Highland games. They also offer a DNA test for anyone who's interested in comparing their Y-DNA with that of King Robert II.

Exploring Hidden Nobility: Signers of the Declaration of Arbroath

To the Scots, the Declaration of Arbroath, signed 6 April 1320 by the Lords and Barons who supported Robert the Bruce in his fight for Scottish Independence, amounts to a Declaration of Independence.

To have one's name or seal attached to the famous declaration is a mark of honor.

WikiTree therefore has an entire page devoted to the Declaration of Arbroath Nobility. It's important to Google for hidden WikiTree pages like this one. You may miss out on a great resource that is not well advertised by WikiTree. If you have a category that cannot be found on the "Featured Connections" page, do not despair! Interested in Puritan Migration ships? Just Google "Puritan Migration ships + WikiTree" and the results may surprise you.

There could be an entirely hidden page on WikiTree completely devoted to your special interest.

More importantly: Keep an eye on the ANCESTOR EXPLORER app. Signers of the Declaration of Arbroath is actually a subcategory within the hidden menu on that app!

Using this hidden feature of the Ancestor Explorer app, I discover that, through my maternal grandmother Bernice Gabriel, my family are related to a dozen signers, including:

Duncan MacDuff (1289 - 1353), Earl of Fife - 1st Cousin 21 Times Removed and probably a direct ancestor to my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw, through the Clan Shaw

Sir Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray (1278 - 1332) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Sir Malise, 7th Earl of Strathearn (1278 - 1372) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Maol Choluim Lennox, 5th Earl of Lennox (1282 - 1333) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

William O'Beolan, Third Earl of Ross (1249 - 1322) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Walter Stewart, Sixth High Steward of Scotland (1298 - 1327) - 23rd great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Sir Henry Sinclair, 7th Lord of Roslin (1265 - 1336) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

More Hidden Nobility: Descent from Magna Carta Surety Barons

Magna Carta Barons are obviously a special feature of the Relationship Finder app. Because they lived in the 12th Century, the mathematical probability that you have some family on the list is surprisingly high. Worth a try!

A large WikiTree team has worked very hard on validating and expanding the family trees connected to these Barons, and it shows. To my amazement, my family may claim several lines of descent from Magna Carta Surety Barons.

Notably. my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw (Shaw-6972) is:

• A 21st great-granddaughter of William D'Aubigny
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Hugh le Bigod
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Henry de Bohun
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Gilbert de Clare
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John Fitz-Robert
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert FitzWalter
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of William de Huntingfield
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John de Lacy
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William Malet
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William de Mowbray
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Saer de Quincy
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert de Ros
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert de Vere

My maternal grandfather, Lawrence Michael Gabriel (Gabriel-322) is:

• A 22nd great-grandson of William D'Aubigny
• A 22nd great-grandson of Hugh le Bigod
• A 23rd great-grandson of Henry de Bohun
• A 22nd great-grandson of Gilbert de Clare
• A 23rd great-grandson of John FitzRobert
• A 24th great-grandson of Robert FitzWalter
• A 24th great-grandson of William de Huntingfield
• A 22nd great-grandson of John de Lacy
• A 25th great-grandson of William Malet
• A 23rd great-grandson of William de Mowbray
• A 22nd great-grandson of Saer de Quincy
• A 23rd great-grandson of Robert de Ros
• A 22nd great-grandson of Geoffrey de Say
• A 22nd great-grandson of Robert de Vere

My maternal grandmother, Bernice (Libel) Gabriel, is:

• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William d'Aubigny
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Hugh le Bigod
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Henry de Bohun
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Gilbert de Clare
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John FitzRobert
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Robert FitzWalter
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of William de Huntingfield
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of John de Lacy
• A 24th great-granddaughter of William Malet
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William de Mowbray
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Saer de Quincy
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Robert de Ros
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Geoffrey de Say
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Robert de Vere

Conclusion: It's a fairly safe bet to say that my family are related to the Magna Carta Surety Barons listed by WikiTree's Relationship Finder Quick Links.

Thank you, Magna Carta team! You're beautiful!

The 1619 Project

A group of journalists at the New York Times have launched a project to place slavery at the center of the narrative of American history.

Their argument is that slavery arrived in America in 1619, a year before the first Mayflower Pilgrim landed on Plymouth Rock (1620).

See a summary of their work at the Wikipedia article The 1619 Project. This is very definitely an ethnic group study, not a lineage society, but essential reading for genealogists.

Lineage Societies: Mayflower Descendants

See The Mayflower Society: General Society of Mayflower Descendants since 1897

Are you a descendant of one of the Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock aboard the ship Mayflower in 1620? The Mayflower Society estimates there are now 35 million descendants living.

For a list of some of the gateway ancestors, see: Mayflower Society - Wikipedia.

Lineage Societies: The Jamestowne Society

Members of the Jamestowne Society are descended from early settlers who lived or held colonial government positions in Jamestowne, Virginia prior to 1700, or who invested in its establishment.

See: The Jamestowne Society at Jamestowne.org

WikiTree Category: Jamestowne Society

Now, on the WikiTree page for this society, you will notice only six WikiTree profiles listed. But take a look a the Jamestowne Society's own

Long List of Qualifying Seventeenth Century Ancestors here.

There are more than 300 names that qualify for membership! Clearly this is a lineage society that could be greatly expanded on WikiTree.

Unlike the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), The Jamestowne Society is fairly small, and unable to provide much research for its members. The WikiTree community could help enormously.

If you are a generous soul, please by all means help WikiTree to expand its very short list of Jamestowne Society members.

An example of how one might help: While scanning the long list of 300+ qualifying members at Jamestowne.org, run the names that interest you through WikiTree's search engine, just to see if those Jamestowne ancestors are present on WikiTree.

If you do get a match, why not add the appropriate "Jamestowne Society" sticker to the Wikitree profile?

Where can one find the appropriate tag and formatting? See an example: John Downing, who died 1699, is a qualifying member.

Lineage Societies: Daughters of the American Revolution

From the Wikipedia article Daughters of the American Revolution:

"The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a person involved in the United States' struggle for independence. A non-profit group, they promote education and patriotism. The organization's membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of soldiers or others of the Revolutionary period who aided the cause of independence; applicants must have reached 18 years of age and are reviewed at the chapter level for admission. The DAR has over 185,000 current members in the United States and other countries. Its motto is "God, Home, and Country".

See: WikiTree Category: Daughters of the American Revolution here.