Ancestral Resonance

As I write this, our youngest son and his girlfriend are ‘rattling over’ the green countryside of Ireland. Sive's mother hails from there and they spent many summers visiting family. Evan has now been twice and will probably be going back regularly, too. I hope that we will get a chance to go, someday, as well. I have an unusually significant soft spot for Ireland, though it is not ancestral. At least I don’t think so.

In high school, I went through a period where I actually wanted to be of Irish descent. During a unit in English class with my teacher, Mrs. Zimmerman, we read several Irish authors and poets, watched a documentary or two, and I wrote my final term paper on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In an attempt to verify my sources, I called the Library of Trinity College in Dublin and spoke to a very patient man who gave me not only his somewhat reticent opinion about the Troubles but some curt research advice, too, which may have been his way of telling me that my youthful enthusiasm was ignoring the tragedy and loss of life that had devastated their partitioned northern kin. This was my Junior year, so by the time school let out for the summer, I was annoying everyone around me with my attempt at a Derry or Belfast accent, watching Patriot Games and Sins of the Father on repeat, listening to U2, Clannad, Enya and The Cranberries and talking nonstop about the Fair Island and the plight of the Northerners.

This was when I noticed that I had a particular sense of kinship or connection to the Irish people. I pestered my elders about several possibilities that the Bares stopped in Ireland on the way across in the 1700s and stayed long enough to earn citizenship and have half-Irish children to explain this feeling of a relationship. It was then, too, that I began my meager attempts at the genealogical work of our family and tried a little too hard to establish a historical Bare enclave in the heart of Eire. 

My paternal grandmother told me about her grandfather, “Pappy White”, whose name sounded Irish to me and I doubled down on my endeavor to make this ancient root of our family my connection to possible Irish heritage. My Good Aunt later educated me that White was an anglicized variant of Weis, and thereby, albeit gently, still dashing my hopes. Then I discovered a map of common surnames in Ireland and Northern Ireland and way down near the bottom of the list was Bare. I never followed it up to see if those Irish Bares were aware that they had Germanic heritage. I still intend to.

All these years later, despite doing far more genealogy and cataloging paperwork submitted to me by the family for the Bare “file” in the library history and genealogy room, it is clear that we Bares are purely of continental European lineage. We are Swiss and German in that limb of the family tree and despite my attempts to shoehorn Ireland into the list as a possible homeland, there is no proof, and without evidence, I cannot make the claim, simply because I want it to be true. But I do want it to be true.

Some of my behavior in my Junior year was sheer teenage relish. When we have a one in front of our age, our brains aren't fully formed and we are obsessive, compulsive, ignorant of consequences and plain annoying to our elders and peers. Even so, I can still conjure the depth of feeling I had that somewhere in our ancestry lay Irish roots. I had a strong sense of kinship with the culture, feeling something like gravity pulling me in. In my deepest parts, there had to be some Celtic tuning fork that resonated when I heard the lilting Irish brogue, listened to traditional Irish music or read Irish authors and poets.

Perhaps if at this point in my life, I had the fortune to have globe-hopping parents, I might have made a trip and seen the Fair Isle and met some of her people. My youthful experience of the world was limited by my parents who stayed close to their Pennsylvanian region. World travel was not something they did.

Years later, as Micki and I and her English cousins traipsed through Wales on holiday, I once again felt a stirring of something as I gazed at the verdant, hilly landscapes of the Welsh homeland. There was a distinct buzz of that ancestral resonance that I had first felt in high school. Here, too, was something elusive in me that caused a surging or leaping of my spirit at the cheerful voices and gorgeous Welsh tongue spoken everywhere around me. Micki’s family does have Welsh and Irish heritage, and as we perused graveyards and read ancient stones, her family’s many surnames showed up as a matter of course. Her paternal grandmother’s parents were from the UK, though, so it isn’t hard to trace that familial connection without the need to do a DNA test.

Some people have had their DNA tested and received a list of genetic heritage well beyond their dreams. I have one friend who, having expected a fairly vanilla European heritage, discovered that a huge slice of their genetic pie chart was Native American. It changed them and it certainly shifted their worldview.

I have resisted getting my DNA done. I have a specific terror of finding out that my heritage has some splinter ethnicity that winds up being the target of some nightmare dystopian regime and I get sent to a camp or executed as a result. It has happened before. You may call me paranoid, but The Holocaust and the Rwandan mass genocides are the most poignant, though not the only examples of this actually happening in modern times. 

Despite not being Irish, at least as far as I have been willing or able to test the theory, I still have a strong and noticeable sympathy for the Celtic ethnicity. The Irish and other Celtic people are the only ones for me with this intensity of apparent connection. I have felt sympathy or solidarity with other cultures in other ways, but never to the same extent. While bored in an online training, I clicked through videos and came across one of a traditional Maori Haka, or ceremonial dance. If you have never seen this amazing performance, please go look it up right now. Although threatening in appearance, a haka is actually a deeply respectful gesture, showing kinship and affection with ancient and powerful words and chants and gestures. As I watched, I felt gooseflesh ripple over my arms and legs and experienced a frisson of shared humanity at such a deep level that I was moved to tears.

The likelihood of discovering that I have Maori DNA, I admit, is pretty low. Even if a tiny fraction of a fraction of my ancestry is Maori, it is probably not enough to capture this resonance with the Haka. Rather, what I think I feel during the ceremonial chant is a kinship that surpasses ethnicity. I am connecting with people not because of their heritage or mine, but because we are human and we have points of experience, emotion, and maybe even history in common. That connection shares a frequency. They have a beautiful way of expressing their humanity and I feel that. When confronted with a dance or a painting or a story or poem of this kind, I happen to feel very keenly the sense of connection and sympathy with the humanity of my fellow humans.

I certainly feel a connection to the Celtic peoples, at least as much as I do with my own traceable heritage. I can eat schnitzel or other delicious German food and feel a distinct connection to my forebears and my ancestry. It is an amazingly centering thing to experience. I don’t particularly love Polka, but the Germanic and Scandinavian people have long and glorious histories of art, music, poetry, and creation that I feel pride in. It seems odd to me that Celtic culture and language and music and art and poetry should also provoke this feeling in me when there is no apparent genetic connection.

But then again, sitting on a beach a few years ago, a bagpiper came down and started piping a little way away from us, and I had that old familiar feeling; like he was playing my song. A song of deep inheritance. A song I had no business feeling such a connection but still felt as if it were a message from my ancestors. As the notes danced in my ears, I suddenly wanted to see the sun come up over the highlands and hear the rich Scottish brogue and feel the keen wind off the North Sea. I have no idea where this feeling came from, but it was real.

Modernity and the Internet have provided our society with a wider view of cultures and sometimes a little more awareness about how to treat and accept others despite our differences. Some of this is, as Christopher Hitchens calls it in his own words, “empty-headed multiculturalism” and can be disregarded as a pretense of fraternity rather than anything sincere or respectful. If we identify with a certain culture despite not having any real genetic connection, the voices of sensitivity will speak up and call that cultural appropriation, especially if like me, that identification threatens to unbalance the reality of our heritage. The Celtic people deserve to be themselves without me shoving my oar in and trying to become Celtic, especially if I’m not Celtic.

My fascination with possible Irish heritage is an odd, and admittedly disconnected thing. My ancestors hailed (so far back as any of us have plumbed) from Northern Europe, spanning the Germanic and Scandinavian regions. Most of the family names on either side of my tree have decidedly Teutonic origins. The Heinlys (formerly Heinlein), the Swaberlichs, The Kesslers, the Gepharts, the Zimmermans, the Weises, the Bares; to read it is to see a list of surnames so common to my former region of birth that no one would turn a hair at them, where I grew up. There is nothing Celtic, nothing Gaelic, nothing overtly English. Some friends I grew up with had names like O’Donnell or McEwan, Smith or Johnson. I have not a shred of the Anglo-Saxon, except as a remnant of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, German tribes who, in the 5th Century landed with the brothers Horsa and Hengist on the islands of Britain and Ireland but were either defeated by the tenacious residents or were assimilated by the Britonic and Celtic peoples who swelled to the defense of their island homes.

Four hundred years later, when hulking, white-blond-haired giants in longships landed in England and Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon people saw their ancestral heritage walk up out of the sea and establish a rule called the Danelaw. Those Viking invaders were probably my ancestors, too, as my maternal grandfather's people likely hailed from just over the border in Denmark and were possibly cattle reavers. If any trace of Germanic heritage from the previous invasion remained in Ireland when the cruel Norse Vikings landed there in the 10th Century, I have no way of knowing. Even if this possible double connection isn’t very probable, it cannot even be said to be worth considering. How would one attempt to ascertain that one’s ancestors came over with either Horsa and Hengist or the Dane and Norse invaders? It seems solipsistic, not to say narcissistic to hope that some ancestor of mine came with either of these unwelcome visitors just so I can finally have some justification for feeling this bizarre resonance.

Recently, our middle son and his wife gave us family access to Duolingo, a language training app. On a whim, I decided to try my hand at the Irish language, as well as Latin, Danish, Welsh, Italian, Swedish and Spanish. As I have delved into the beautiful and poetic Irish tongue, I once again felt something more than kinship. The verb order, the sonorous sibilance, the swelling tides of description matched against the elegant efficiency of terms caused that tuning fork in my bones to vibrate again. I felt familiar with it. It made sense to me at some basic level. I wish I could explain it.

I secretly hope that, in a few years, when our youngest kids get married, maybe they will do it as a destination wedding in Ireland. If that happens, perhaps I can set foot upon this island that has had a disproportionately strong gravity on my sense of self despite the obvious lack of real heritage. In the meantime, I will live vicariously through Swift and Conan Doyle and Heaney and Wilde and Yeats and Stoker and Beckett and their many words and the pictures from our kids and maybe at some point in the future, I will gather up enough grit to forswear my distaste for genetic testing and answer the question for good and all. To paraphrase the great Irish writer and comic, Oscar Wilde, though, until such time that I do find out if there is a drop of Irish heritage in my blood, I must be myself, since everyone else is taken. Further quoting Wilde, “The truth is never pure and rarely simple”. I think that it can be stated unequivocally that this is especially true when it comes to heritage and genetics.

In the meantime, I will be content to feel this ancestral resonance, even if it isn’t based on anything measurable. I will attempt to do it in such a way that I don’t offend anyone who is actually Irish or Celtic, but it will be hard for me to hide that swell of national and cultural pride that doesn’t belong to me, despite how intensely it floods me with ethnic joy, when I think about Ireland.