My husband, Grant, was adopted from the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home in Jacksonville in late 1945 when he was seven months old.  As soon as he got to the age of comprehension, his parents told him he was adopted.  By that time, two other children had been adopted, each from different parents and backgrounds.

Grant was fine with being adopted.  His loving parents and, truly, the whole community treated him like a prince.  His parents were proud Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, with Scotch-Irish and English ancestry.  His mother was a highly-regarded genealogist and Southern historian.  When she told her son that their family had been among the earliest settlers of America, he took that as his rightful bloodline. 

I met Grant in the summer of 1987 and his adoptive parents the following Easter.  By that time, his mother had written numerous genealogy books.  One was called Unto This Land, which tells the history of the St. Johns Park area of Flagler County, Florida and its pioneer settlers and their descendants. This was my favorite book of hers because it was chock full of pictures and colorful stories.  I was always drawn to faces because they always tell their own tales. So I took my time flipping through the pages of that particular book.

When I got to page 299, my eyes locked onto the picture of a man taken in 1905.  The man’s name was Charles Frederick Palmquist and, while he ended up in Flagler County by way of Chicago, Illinois and Niles, Michigan, he was originally from Vexer, Sweden (where the family name was Johanason.  Charles changed it to Palmquist in the United States so he could sound more American, and that struck me as funny).  He was married twice and had 11 children.  What captured my attention was that my husband looked remarkably like him. Same hairline, facial shape, Neanderthal brow, pale eyes, broad nose, frog mouth, cleft chin – the works.

I went running to Grant to tell him that I thought I had stumbled upon his biological family.  Charles would’ve been way too old to have fathered Grant but several of his children were of the right age to have gotten the job done.

I zeroed in on one son named Carlton.  Aside from the cleft chin, Grant didn’t look anything like Carlton.  What they had in common was Miami (where both were at the time of Grant’s birth) and Jacksonville (where they both were at the time of Grant’s adoption). 

“I’ll bet you’re Charles’ grandson and Carlton’s son,” I said to Grant, showing him pictures.  Grant had to admit he bore a resemblance to Charles.  “Let’s ask Mama,” I said.

Grant wasn’t too sure that was a good idea but we decided to go for it anyway.  Mama chuckled when I suggested that Grant might be a Palmquist and said, “Oh, golly, that would be a hoot.”  Turns out, Grant’s Aunt Marjorie was married to Carlton’s brother, Earl.  I guess we could have asked Earl if his brother knocked someone up in the 1940s but Earl was a pretty devout Methodist and the question would have been awkward, to say the least.  So we just dropped it and pretended that Grant was a secret Palmquist (the American Swede).

All we had to go on was Grant’s eerie resemblance to Charles, Carlton’s whereabouts when Grant was small, Grant’s attraction to Swedish names and Minneapolis, where he lived for 10 years around plenty of Swedes, and hordes of women telling him looked Scandinavian.

Of course, Grant said to me once, “I was born in South Florida.  Could I possibly be Jewish?”

“Not with that face,” I replied.

So we spent years convinced that Grant was a Swede.  He really liked the idea.

Some time back, we attempted to find out who Grant’s biological parents were but records in Florida were sealed.  They have since become unsealed and we’ve been thinking of trying to find his blood relations again - especially since his adoptive parents and siblings are all deceased.  We’ll do it someday.

In the meantime, I bought Grant an Ancestry.com DNA kit for Christmas.  We awaited the results with both enthusiasm and trepidation.  Before he opened the e-mail containing the report, I said, “Mark my words. You’re a Palmquist.”

Turns out, he’s not a Palmquist – or a Johanason, for that matter.  The resemblance to Charles Frederick Palmquist is purely coincidental.  According to the study, Grant is 75 percent from Great Britain, nine percent from Ireland and five percent from western Europe.  Trace regions include Italy and Greece (four percent), Eastern Europe (four percent), Scandinavia (two percent), Finland and Northwest Russia (less than one percent) and the Iberian Peninsula (less than one percent).  In fact, he has pretty much the same lineage as his adoptive parents.

Grant was deeply disappointed.  “I’m just another pasty-faced white boy,” he lamented. 

“Well, it would explain your affection for fish and chips,” I said. 

I wonder how accurate these tests are.  My brother is awaiting DNA results from 23andMe.  He said, “Hey, Min. Your results would be the same as my results, right?

Wrong.  Some DNA is shared, sure.  But DNA is mixed and inherited differently.  I do know one thing for sure.  If my brother’s report shows that he’s 75 percent from Great Britain and nine percent from Ireland, I am going to suspect that something is amiss.  All of the forebears we know of came from Eastern Europe – Russia, Romania, Ukraine and Poland.  But where were they before that?  That’s the question.

Some time back, I had a molar pregnancy (no, it has nothing to do with teeth.  It’s a chromosomal thing where two sperm fertilize one egg.  Mine was a partial molar pregnancy – look it up.).  I was told that Caucasian Americans very rarely suffered molar pregnancies and that most cases were found in women of Southeast Asian, Mexican and Filipino extraction.  So, go figure.  Maybe I’m not entirely Eastern European.  Or maybe I’m just unlucky.

And, consider this: When I was a five-year-old insomniac, my father attempted to put me to sleep with tales of his other-worldliness.  He would put on a strange voice and say, “We are not from this place.  Have you noticed the greenish cast of our skin?  When everyone’s asleep, I travel the cosmos and return to my mother planet.”

Really? Maybe I would never go to sleep again.  Or maybe I, too, traveled the cosmos at night.  I was his daughter, right?  Wasn’t my skin also greenish? Wasn’t my mother always saying, “She needs a little sun?”  Couldn’t I have just said, “Of course, we’re greenish.  We’re olive-skinned Mediterraneans, not Martians”?

No, I was too young to say that.  Plus, I once caught him in the act of traveling the cosmos.  I had crawled into my parents’ bedroom one night, unable to sleep, and found my father standing in front of the window in his boxers staring out at a sky streaked with red and yellow stripes.  His back was to me but his body was an empty husk, like he was not inhabiting it.  I backed out of that room pretty damned quick.

Jesus.  Maybe we are from a different planet.  It is true that I’ve have my share of medical anomalies, including the aforementioned molar pregnancy.  My DNA has been at the Mayo Clinic for years with researchers shaking their heads wondering which planet I’m from.  Maybe it’s not Mars.  Maybe it’s Romulac.  Or Hell (yes, I know that Hell isn’t a planet but if bats could come out of it, why not I?).

So, depending on my my brother’s experience with 23andMe (and he’s definitely not greenish so he must have more DNA from my mother from the Bronx than my father from the Cosmos), I will either purchase a DNA kit from them or Ancestry.com to try to get to the bottom of where I’m coming from.  I do have an affinity for Ireland.  Maybe there’s a reason for that.  But I’m probably as Irish as Grant is Swedish.  I’ll let you know.