I’ve never gotten into genealogy. What I know of my ancestry comes mostly from stories that I heard my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles tell. My mother did spend significant energy and time researching genealogy after I moved away from home and I now have her notes on genealogy. I dabble at getting those notes organized, scanned, and into a form that might be accessible to others and I hope to wade through many boxes of family history in a process of transferring all of those boxes of paper records to digital records, but I am making slow progress. Often days go by when I haven’t worked on the project at all and when I do work at it, the sheer mass of paper seems overwhelming. I don’t know about other people, but my life continues to be full of uncompleted tasks. Boredom doesn’t seem likely anytime in the foreseeable future.

There are a few conclusions about family and family history that shape my approach. The first is that while genetics are important and shape who we are, the biological connections between people are only part of our human story. For some, tracing those genetic connections is important. For me, however, the importance of those connections is less important. I haven’t been tempted to explore any of the commercial DNA tracing programs that exist. I know several people who have done AncestryDNA, 23andMe, or CRI Genetics. I also know that there are medical and health-related benefits that can come from some forms of DNA testing. So far, however, I haven’t been attracted to any of those programs. In terms of how I live my life, genetic relationships are only part of the story and perhaps not the most important part.

I grew up with adopted brothers and sisters. I have an adopted daughter. For me family has always been more than an assembly of people who are biologically related. My people are not defined by the DNA we share. Perhaps because that is an important part of my story I have been attracted to the many places in the biblical narrative where families are blended and people from outside of the family are brought in. Ruth chose to go with her mother-in-law Naomi rather than return to her genetic family when she was widowed. Her story is one of the great hero narratives of our traditions. As far as I am concerned there is no meaningful distinction between my brother who was adopted into our family and my brother who was born of the same mother and father as I. All of us were raised by the same parents under the same roof. All of us have lifetimes of shared memories. We belong together.

Our daughter is every bit as much our daughter as the daughters of people who conceived and birthed children. Her son is every bit as much our grandson as the children of our son and daughter-in-law who carry our genetic lineage.

Tracing DNA might be valuable in discovering part of our story, but it would only be part and the other parts are equally important in my way of thinking.

Another reason I am less interested in following formal genealogies is that the communities of love and support that have surrounded us through our life journey are not attached to place. While there is a farm in Montana that has been tended by five generations of my mother’s family, my mother did not stay on the farm. She married a man who wasn’t from that place and spent her time in other places. She was born in Montana, but lived in California, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Dakota as well as living in Montana. On my father’s side of the family a couple of generations is the longest any of our people stayed in the same place. My father was born in the same part of North Dakota as his father, but my great grandfather was born farther east. Follow the family back a few generations and you find a blending of people who left various parts of what is now Germany before a unified Germany existed. Some ended up in Pennsylvania and others in Ohio Amish Country. Other relatives made a more convoluted trip from the places where they got their German names, attracted to the Volga region of Russia following the Crimean War. Others settled temporarily in southern Ukraine. They all retained bits of German culture and language when they left Russia and Ukraine for the United States, settling in the Great Plains.

Sometimes my father would refer to our ancestry as Pennsylvania Dutch, sometimes he would refer to Germans from Russia. He knew bits of the stories of several branches of our family tree. Like those generations of family, we have never quite landed in a single place. Susan was born in North Dakota and I was born in Montana. We met in Montana and lived there before living in Illinois, North Dakota, Idaho, South Dakota, and now Washington. The place we stayed longest in our marriage was South Dakota which was our home for 25 years. We know people whose family ancestry can be traced for dozens and dozens of generations in a single place. Our Lummi neighbors say their people have lived in the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial. For them place is critical to their identity. This is less true for us.

I find my story to land somewhere between indigenous people who have somehow survived in place for countless generations and recent immigrants who are seeking some place to call home. I think of 1.7 million people forced from their homes in Gaza since October. Their stories combine with others for a record-breaking 120 million new refugees in the past year. Taken together that is more than the population of Japan. Some call Congo or Myanmar or Syria or Sudan home. Some have fled Lybia and other countries. A few seek a new home in the USA to which my ancestors came as refugees years ago.

I am kin to all of these people, whether we are connected by DNA or by the simple fact that we are all trying to live peacefully together on the same street in a small coastal community. Ours is Nooksack and Lummi but also Sikh and Ukrainian and Mexican. We visited the regional hospital in Bellingham yesterday where they need translation services for 30 different languages. Susan volunteers in our grandchildren’s primary school where she knows children who speak English, Spanish, and Russian at home. Ours is a blended family in a blended community. And we are all connected regardless of what the DNA tests might reveal.

I am as fascinated by the diversity of my neighborhood as I am by the specifics of the genetics I carry. As our Lakota friends say, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ”. We are all related.