Friday Funny: Wait, I'm What? Or How Ancestry DNA Has Messed With My Reality

I think I should probably start you where I started, with my own name:
First Name: Rhiannon
Middle Name: Kathleen

Recent Family Surnames: Jones, Evans, Potter, Mauracher, Branson, Kern, Lorentzen, Tuggy, Parrish, Lasswell, Hawes, Sheldon, Tharp.  For those of you keeping track, that's Welsh, Welsh, English, Austrian, English, Irish, German, English, English, Irish, English, English, and English.  Forgive me for thinking there must be some British DNA coursing through my veins.

When I got my Ancestry DNA results, though, they looked like this:

Wait, what?

Attached was a lovely letter telling me all about my Italian and Swedish ancestry.  I have two great-grandparents who came from Austria, and one from Denmark.  Otherwise, everyone is pretty darn British Isles, way way back.  25% Austrian, 12.5% Danish, and 100% pretty confused, that's me.

My son is thrilled, he now tells everyone we are Italian.  Apparently it is considerably more hip than Irish in elementary school.  And he's a huge Cake Boss fan, which may be a coolness factor.  He's sure we're related to Buddy now.

Conveniently, I got the letter the same day I went to my dad's family reunion.  Though there were a lot of raised eyebrows, I assure you that they were very similar eyebrows in faces that looked, for better or worse, so much like mine that I'm pretty sure they are my genetic relatives.

I figure the Southern European piece comes from the Austrian Tyrollean folks, which is actually quite close to the Italian border.  So I'm willing to give them the 18%.

But I am a little appalled that after years of trotting out my Welshness at every opportunity, right down to attending Celtic Festivals with a pout due to 'our' under-representation, I don't have the genes to back it up.  I have a Welsh flag.  I have all these little blippy bits on the map above, which represent birthplaces on my family tree.  I married an Irishman, I have red hair and a red-headed, Irish monikered son.  I have known the story of my legendary namesake Rhiannon (no, not the Fleetwood Mac song) since preschool.  I know who I am, darn it.

Or not.

I get the Scandinavian conquerer aspect, I do.  I know that the red hair is a Scandinavian thing, I know they've been trotting/breeding around the British Isles for millennia.  But still, I'd expected a little something Celtic.  Or Anglo-Saxon.   Or Gaelic.   A bit of inter-marriage to back up all those surnames doesn't seem a lot to ask.  So I'll see if the data changes as more people try the Ancestry DNA approach, but try to embrace my new self in the meantime.

So I'm trying to use my hands more when I talk, and considering changing my name to Regina, which means the same thing as Rhiannon.  And there must be a Scandinavian Festival around here somewhere, where I can pout because the Danes are neglected . . . .

Those Places Thursday: Why Smithfield Market is Important in Our Locavore World

In 1993-1994, I was at University College London on a Fulbright Scholarship for the study of Victorian Geography.  After a key hotel in my first topic, Scarborough in Yorkshire, fell into the sea, I decided to come up with a second and more convenient topic.  I chose the Smithfield Market.

Today, the City of London and various historic organizations are struggling to determine a plan for the market building.  This is a question that, I think, is more broad than the structure itself.  Which is saying something - it is a LARGE building.

For my research, I was fascinated by how the urban depictions of the market and its participants evolved as London developed into an industrial city.  A market which started out in the 14th century as a natural part of the city became, by the end of the 19th, an object of ridicule and derision.  The farmers who came to the market, and their animals, were seen as fat, uncouth bumpkins who were dazzled and amazed by sophisticated urban London, even as the Londoners happily ate the products provided.

It was a microcosm of the industrial and post-industrial detachment from food sources, from farming, and from rural people.  But we are now learning, across the globe, the consequences of that detachment:  GMOs, pesticide-contaminated food supplies, wide disparities of food quality, and disregard for food production, from farmers to honeybees.

Smithfield is a symbol of the long-gone balance between urban and rural, the ways in which the two populations need each other and need to support each other.  We have lost that relationship, pushed the farmers farther and farther away even as our city edges expand, and we no longer recognize their importance.

In Denver, we have the National Western Stockshow, which comes to the city every January.   Hundreds of thousands of people go to the show, wearing their best cowboy gear.  The cattle are paraded through the downtown.  The Junior Livestock Auction is broadcast on TV.  For a week, we connect with the farmers and ranchers upon whom we depend.

Around the world, we are attempting to reconnect: the locavore movement, the slow food movement, the farm-to-table movement - these are all connection opportunities.  I think it's only fitting that while we are making these changes, we are also preserving the old connection points, like Smithfield.  There are always things to be learned by understanding our past, particularly in this fragile moment when we are just starting to recognize what we lost in between.