Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Practical Parenting

Over the past couple of weeks, I picked up one of my periodic past times of climbing the proverbial family tree. I tend to get really wrapped up in it for a few weeks and then reach a wall through which I cannot break and give up for a while until I'm moved to pick it up again and the cycle continues. Every time I get a bit further or have a new piece of information to add.

This time has been no different and I'm preparing to put it all away again, but not before I had one last poke around Ancestry dot com. (Yeah, I just think it's funny that we're not starting to write out "dot com". Hee hee.) I stumbled upon a gimmick feature that allows people to search for "famous relatives" and I was sucked right in.

I thought the most efficient way to search the entire family tree for "famous relative" was to search for the "famous relatives" of my kids. So I clicked on my son and clicked "Find famous relatives". Of course, we come from a stellar line of genetic prowess and a lengthy (and eclectic) list of famous relatives spews forth onto the screen.

The list included:

• 2 prime ministers
• 1 first lady
• 3 presidents (including Nixon, unfortunately!)
• a Mayflower passenger
• a financier and banker
• a physicist
• the founder of General Motors
• several inventors
• "Wild Bill" Hickock
• John Steinbeck
• Robert Frost
• John Glenn
• Amelia Earhart
• Samuel Morse (of Morse Code fame)
• Elizabeth Browning
• Aldous Huxley
• Audrey Hepburn
• A quite a few more

As you can probably imagine, I'm feeling pretty well-connected at this point. I'm pulling out the old address book and working on adding some new contacts. Then, I thought, hmmmm. I wonder which people belong to which side of the family. 

So, I click on my name and click "Find famous relatives" and guess what? I'm not even related to the British people on the list. What?!?! Maybe I picked the wrong person, I thought to myself. So I clicked again. Again, nothing! None of them. I'm not related to anyone famous. In fact, the screen pointed this fact out with brutal honesty..."You have no famous relatives." Thanks a lot.

I guess this means that my husband married beneath him and my kids are just too good for me. In fact, I guess this means I've just polluted the family gene pool. Great. Just what I needed to hear.