Mark Shernick

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Descendant of Magnus Maximus, aka Macsen Wledig, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire from 383 to 388.

Descendant of Charlemagne, aka Carolus Magnus or Charles the Great, King of Franks (768 - 814), Emperor of the Romans (800 - 814) and founder of the Carolingian Empire.

Descendant of William The Conqueror, aka William I, Duke of Normandy, King of England from 1066 to 1087.

Descendant of Alienor of Aquitaine, who reigned as Queen of France (1137 - 1152) and Queen of England (1154 - 1189).

Descendant of Louis Capet of France, aka St. Louis, who reigned as King of France (1226 - 1270) and led the 7th Crusade (1248) and 8th Crusade (1270).

Descendant of King Robert I, known as Robert the Bruce, who reigned as King of Scots from 1306 to 1329.

Descendant of King Edward III, Plantagenet, who reigned as King of England from 1327 to 1377.

Descendant of Sir Henry Sinclair (1345 - 1400), 1st Earl of Orkney, who allegedly discovered America 100 years before Columbus.

Descendant of King James I, who reigned as King of Scots from 1406 to 1437.

Descendant of Elizabeth Woodville (1437 - 1492), of York, known as "The White Queen," who secretly married King Edward IV about 1452 and was crowned Queen Consort of England 1464 - 1470.

Descendant of Mary Boleyn (1499 - 1543), sister of Anne Boleyn and mistress to King Henry VIII (Tudor).

Biography

My name is Mark. I am a writer and amateur photographer who used to live in Colorado Springs, then Minneapolis, then Seattle, then Denver. I now live in Kansas City, MO (go Royals!)

My father's family descend from an ancient line of Ukrainian royalty, and I am fascinated by all things Romanov. The Counts Czernichow, who descend from the ancient Princes of Chernigov, appear to be royal bastards in every sense of that word. If I have traced their difficult lineage correctly, then they are the illegitimate offspring of Tsar Peter the Great.

My mother's family are French Alsatians who lived in Ukraine for a century before migrating to Texas, Kansas and Missouri in the 19th Century. Two or three branches of her family descend from Virginia Cavaliers who fought on the side of the Stuart family during the English Civil War. We can now proudly trace her family tree back to the Stuarts and Sinclairs of ancient Scotland and to more than a dozen soldiers who fought as patriots in the American Revolution.

As a young man I attended the Fountain Valley School of Colorado and I graduated from Carleton College in 1983 with a degree in English Literature.

My goal in life is to write funny short stories better than J.D. Salinger, to sing "That's Life" better than Frank Sinatra, and some day to drive back to the 1960s in a time machine cleverly disguised as a Dodge Dart.

In addition to genealogy my hobbies include: falling in love with dead poets, writing and illustrating short biographies, blogging, learning new AI tools, exploring classic movies on TCM, raiding the archives of vintage magazines online for hidden gems, retouching and colorizing Broadway theatre photos and old movie star portraits, dusty grooving to old 78 rpm collections, giggling over retro 1960s TV shows, and collecting surreal and dreamlike images on Pinterest.

Below, you will find a very long biography (pardon my narcissism) that is still a work in progress. I've tried to break it into bite-sized chapters, have included the story of a college romance that went wrong yet oh-so-right (I still love her!), and have added lots of links to some of my favorite books and music -- the colorful soundtrack of my life, hidden like Easter Eggs throughout.

This section is meant for casual browsing and for fun. Again, my life is like a game of whack-a-mole (seems like it's never done), so If you want to zoom through and just click on the music or movie links that look interesting, go right ahead. My other links, which cover why I love WikiTree and explain how to use applications in the WikiTree toolkit may be found by using the back arrow.

And now, your flawed narrator welcomes you (Hi!) and invites you to climb aboard his golf cart and join him for a brief tour of his Mad Existence.

My Youth and Heritage

I was born in the 1960s, in a year that is the same upside down as it is right side up, in a month that is the same upside down as it is right side up, on a day that is the same upside down as it is right side up. Can you guess my birthday?

My father was an art teacher, my mother a book seller. In the 1980s, I studied to be a journalist, and asked God to make me a man of letters.

Result: During the 1990s, I wound up schlepping mail at the post office.

Which means, when you ask God for favors, you need to be specific. The old boy is a bit nearsighted. He tends to hang vague and abstract wishes upside down.

When planning your future, please be specific. Decide which way is up.

My motto: Been down so long, it looks like up to me.

My own life has certainly been a work of surrealistic art. Perhaps that is because my father, like his father before him, was a painter. A painter whose brush could wipe away the dust of everyday life, and turn it into something brilliant.

I share the same birthday as one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali.

In other words: I have a zany side. Books on astrology say that people born on my birthday "have a unique personality that combines practicality with hard work and creativity."

The same books say that my life is ruled by the planet Venus, the planet of love. This is true but not true. My heart has been orbiting, in a very symmetric seven-year pattern, the memory of a love I lost more than 30 years ago. So my life is ruled by Venus, but I have been living a happy, single, chaste and celibate life for more than 30 years.

Now, as I look back on my life, it resembles an old curiosity shop full of beautiful books, strange dolls, puzzle boxes and striking images similar to one of Max Ernst's amusing, imaginative, and often perplexing collages. Outside the Strange Windows of this Deadly Funhouse in Time is a beautiful garden populated by sunflowers, images from the children's book Goodnight, Moon, memories of the tooth fairy, and oddly symbolic shapes, moving like kinetic art in the sunlight and the wind.

My life has been genuinely colorful, playful and delightful, especially in contrast to its dull framework (Nebraska, the rectangle in which I was born), and square surroundings (Colorado, the "Land of a Thousand Rubber Tomahawks" and the L7 state where I grew up).

Perhaps I owe the ability to think big inside a small box to my father, who hung a mobile by Jean Miro over my crib.

My father's hobby was amateur astronomy. Clearly he subscribes to that old saying by Oscar Wilde: "We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

My Dad also told some very strange and fascinating stories about Grandpa Shernick's Russian ancestors, the Princes of Chernigov, when I was a little boy. Chernigov is a city in Ukraine that is not very far from Chernobyl. My ancestors all glow in the dark.

Ukraine, of course, is very much in the news these days. We are told that World War III and the fate of Europe may hinge on what happens in Ukraine. I have no doubt that this prediction is correct: Our fate in real life also hinges very much upon what happens in Narnia or the land of fairytale -- that dark woodland where our unconscious dwells and often gets lost in the snow.

Ukraine is a land full of strange history and dark fairytales.

Maids of Destiny: The Princesses of Chernigov

People don't realize this but our fate may have been sealed already by three Princesses of Chernigov, the daughters of Yaroslav The Wise (978 - 1054). These three sisters played a key role in the fate of Europe almost a thousand years ago, when they intermarried with the royal houses of Norway, Hungary and France:

Princess Elisiv of Kiev married to the famous Viking KIng Harald Hardrada of Norway. She's a root ancestor for the royal family of Norway.

Princess Anastasia of Kiev became a Queen of Hungary. She's a root ancestor for the royal family of Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburg Dynasty.

Princess Anne of Kiev married to King Henry I of France and became a root ancestor of the French Capetian Dynasty -- the French family who later launched the First Crusade and sought the Holy Grail.

There is also a legend that traces Agatha, the mother of St. Margaret of Scotland back to Yaroslav the Wise, Prince of Chernigov, but this has not been confirmed. See Agatha Unknown's story here -- it is actually one of the most famous puzzles of Medieval genealogy -- one that might be solved with help from my DNA.

Because the Princes of Chernigov lived on the Black Sea, not far from the Holy Land, they have a very credible claim of descent from one of the lost tribes of Israel -- the Scythians, from whom the Scottish nation takes its name.

Ancient Scottish legends, which were very popular at the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, claimed that the House of Stuart in Scotland descends from these Scythian "sky kings" of ancient Ukraine. Scotland certainly shares the same patron saint as Ukraine: St. Andrew the Apostle, who traveled to Ukraine and Christianized the region of the Black Sea.

It is to this ancient legend of Scythia and St. Andrew that the Princes of Chernigov, Ukraine trace their own line. They clearly claim affiliation with the Gaelic nations of Ireland, Scotland and France, in addition to a bloodline that's interwoven with the royal families in Norway, Hungary, and France.

For more background on these legends, shrouded in the mist of time,, see the Wikipedia summaries of the legends of Queen Scota and Gaedhil Glas. It's from this legend that my father's father, Gedalia, took his name.

My main point here is that Yaroslav the Wise and the three princesses of Chernigov are at the heart of a little-known Ukrainian branch of the Grail Family.

Both of my parents descend (through their maternal lines) from Princess Anne of Kiev (1036 - 1075). In other words, I am a direct descendant from this same obscure Grail Family of Chernigov and Kiev.

My direct descent from Anne of Kiev is surprisingly strong: WikiTree says I have more than 4,000 lines leading back to her. That's because I have dozens of ancestors from the House of Stuart -- as does King Charles of England.

Puts an interesting spin on the present mess in Ukraine, does it not? Seems to be far away, but in terms of genealogy, it is very near to home. Many of the wealthiest families in western Europe are descendants of these same Ukrainian Princes of Chernigov, the ancient ancestors of my grandfather, Albert Shernick.

While my grandfather's paper-trail pedigree remains a puzzle, our Y-DNA test kits have confirmed that we came from the region of Chernigov. Hence I can confirm with 100 percent confidence that the name Shernick, morphed from Chernigov.

My father's mother, Mildred (Shaw) Shernick was a Scotch-Irish girl from upstate New York.

Whenever I paid a visit to my Grannie Shernick, she would sit me down and we would look through her photo albums. She told amusing stories about the little rascals in her childhood photos, which were filled with flappers and Model T cars, and I felt like a little kid pressing his nose against the front window of her family home, watching the daily lives of all the pixielated people in her small hometown, Lockport, New York. I could see them so clearly, yet they lived 100 years ago. I thought: "I want to write this down!"

My mom once called genealogy "being weird for dead people," but I think it is more accurate to call it an attempt to pass through the Looking Glass to the reality of the past: An almost desperate effort to piece together the Lost Kingdom of Yesteryear.

For me it has become an obsessive-compulsive data entry disorder with a special focus on ancient kings, daring explorers, brilliant inventors, mysterious maps to hidden treasures, baffling murder mysteries, turn-of-the century steamships, old passports, and bad-hair days, as recorded for all of eternity by school yearbook portraits, the kind that need serious color correction.

Someone has got to do the color correction, haven't they? Might as well be me.

Chalk it all up to a crush on history. My seventh-grade history teacher, Aubrey D. West, used to show up for class dressed in full Civil War uniform, and I was hooked.

While normal American high school students of the 1970s were smoking weed, reading National Lampoon or MAD magazine, listening to the Bee-Gees and, yes, reproducing, I was exploring old photos of the Civil War and reading every book ever written by Mark Twain, cover to cover.

He was from Missouri, the Show-Me State. Like my mom. Her family came from one of the First Families of Missouri. They have lived there since the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and one of our relatives, Benjamin Howard (1760 - 1814), was the first governor of Missouri Territory and a general in the War of 1812.

His job? Keep a sharp look out for the British. Perfidious Albion! If they should show up anywhere from, say, the Pacific to, oh, about the Mississippi River, give us a shout.

Every time we went out to visit family for Christmas, I would learn more from mom about the Pony Express route from Denver to St. joseph, and for amusement we would go to visit the Jesse James Home museum.

My concept of heaven was sitting in a big comfy chair at my high school library, like a cat in the sun, reading American history. All that reading got me into college.

Carleton College

I moved up to Minnesota, because it sounded quite exciting to live inside a rectangular state that was vertical.

Turns out, it was more like living inside a Frigidaire. It was extremely cold.

I read English Literature at Carleton College. That is a fine place to read books and dream of Narnian Snow Queens. Plus, there isn't really much more to do in Northfield, except maybe go see the Jesse James Day parade. Ol' Jess tried to make a very large and unauthorized withdrawal from the First National Bank in Northfield.

Turns out that was a big accounting error. The story of the shoot-out is told in a movie called The Long Riders (1980), which has an excellent soundtrack by Ry Cooder.

Northfield, Minnesota, by the way, tends to smell like burnt popcorn. That's not because of all the gun smoke or all the sex going on. It's because of the Malt-O-Meal factory. There are Lutherans in Northfield, attending St. Olaf College, so no one has sex. We wouldn't want to offend them.

I do remember very distinctly, however, studying for a calculus exam one night at the Carleton library and (with my head full of partial fraction decomposition) looking up from my textbook to see -- gliding silently past the dark windows -- an entire line of nude people on skis, wearing nothing but ski caps.

Zing went the Salvador Dali strings of my heart.

The long line of people sitting at the library carrels in front of me had also paused to look out the windows, in shock. As the long line of nude skiers disappeared into the night, we hesitated for another heartbeat. Then we all went back to our reading, without saying a word.

Lesson learned: Do I remember a single thing about partial fraction decomposition? Nope. Do I remember a simple act that suddenly made an ordinary day extraordinary? Yup.

What this world needs is a little magic, imagination, and good humor.

Perhaps that's why I joined a small circle of Carleton Pixies (our version of the Oxford Inklings) who gathered every weekend to share dramatic readings of fairytales -- led by Kara Keeling, who went on to get a Ph.D. in children's literature and is now an expert on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

I fell in love with Arthurian legends, and still remember watching Excalibur (1981) when it was first released. We watched it in the same Northfield theatre where the Rocky Horror Picture Show had the entire audience shouting out the lyrics to The Time Warp.

"Let's do the Time Warp again!"

In the strange resonance of the Grail legends, I felt I had found my mission in life: To somehow translate Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King into a modern adventure during the decade of The Kinks.

Important Note: I am a cradle Catholic, and confirmed my vows of devotion to the Catholic faith in the year 2000, but must here admit to a warm and friendly ("ecumenical") relationship with the Reformed Druids of North America, a group that began as a joke amongst some residents of Carleton's Goodhue dormitory in 1963. Not wishing to obey the college's chapel requirement, which forced them to get up early on Sunday mornings to attend a service at "a place of worship of their choice," they chose instead to invent a religion of their own -- one that allowed them to dance to loud music and drink on a Saturday night.

I first met the Carleton Druids while serving as a features writer at Carleton's student newspaper, The Carletonian, I interviewed two Carleton alumni, David and Deborah Frangquist, who were visiting the campus in October 1981. Very much to my surprise, I learned while reviewing old newsclips for the story, that there was another RDNA founder, a friend of the Franquists named Howard Cherniack. My family research on WikiTree shows he may well be a cousin of mine.

It seems that while I was not aware that I had any Druid relatives in Minnesota,, some strange form of sympathetic vibrational physics drew me up there, and my cousins proceeded to pop out of the woods and say boo.

One thing is certain: I loved writing for the Carletonian, where I met (among other people) Bob Daily and Tom Szentgyorgi, some wickedly funny 'Tonian editors who went on to brilliant careers as TV screenwriters.

I enjoyed greatly the chance to interview professors and visiting speakers, to spotlight the many social activities of our small community and to play Mark Twain by writing humor pieces. I also loved writing "slice of life" stories that attempted to capture snapshots of individual lives on the fly.

I enjoyed my time at Carleton so much that it now seems the college campus is sitting like a snow globe at the center of my mind -- a sort of theatre of memory where I can wander about and visit friends for the rest of eternity.

Yet my time there really flew. All things pass.

When I got done reading books in Northfield after, oh, about four years, I thought, hey wouldn't it be fun to subvert the government? So I moved up to Minneapolis to learn how to do "the Woodward and Bernstein Thing."

My Grail Mission

Now facing the choice of a serious career, my thoughts naturally turned to doing some serious reporting and becoming a professional journalist.

If I made a mistake, it was not the mistake of choosing writing as a career. I truly loved writing biographies, doing photo portraits, gathering "news of the weird," spinning conspiracy theories, exploring history mysteries and sketching humorous anecdotes. These suited me perfectly to be a writer of features and variety pieces, with a few book reviews and theatre reviews thrown in for fun.

My mistake lay in being a bit too serious. I am by nature a nervous nebbish, much like Woody Allen. and playing the role of Clark Kent, ace reporter for the Daily Planet, writing straight news, simply did not suit me.

I know that now. No Ben Hecht am I.

But the Reagan Administration looked like a dragon worth slaying. In 1985, Reagan had laid a wreath at the Bitburg Cemetery in Germany, a cemetery containing the graves of many Nazi S.S. officers. He had made a speech at Bitburg Airbase that declared America's alliance with the former Nazi Germany in an all-out war against Russia.

He had in effect declared a sincere intention to help Germany re-invade and destroy Ukraine and Russia, the homelands of both my mother and my father. To my mind, Germany was still the embodiment of Evil, and this was a madcap scheme that would certainly trigger World War III and might get us all killed.

So I moved up to Minneapolis to go to journalism school at the U of M. My Excalibur was a beat-up electric typewriter. My goal: Prevent Armageddon. Save the World. Oppose The Man, man!

The famous journalist George Seldes once gave young journalists a very simple piece of advice: Tell the Truth -- and Run.

That was my game plan in a nutshell.

Yup. I was a member of what Carleton likes to call "the Last of the Big Dumb Classes." I had only a vague, unfocussed goal that probably sounded great to the ears of the hippies of the 1970s, who wanted to promote "Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman." But my game plan made zero sense to the business world.

How I was going to finance my way all the way to the top of the New York Times or the Washington Post when I did not even own a car was a mystery to me as well.

I wound up taking out more student loans -- on top of my student loans from Carleton. Brilliant.

But at least I was sincere. I was no fake.

That's saying something, because I came from the tail-end of the Baby Boom, a generation known as plastic hippies, plastic flower children or weekend hippies. These brats at the end of the Boom, were wearing Smiley Buttons that said "Have A Nice Day!" but they were trying to land internships at Monsanto or Honeywell. Those in marketing were trying to sell useless junk to school kids; and I am not talking about Pet Rocks, waterbeds, plastic pyramids, or lava lamps. In the 1980s, many of these Milo Minderbinders went on to get MBAs and work for Goldman Sachs, selling junk bonds and toxic derivatives to Iceland.

As an innocent plastic flower child, I am still welcome in Iceland. But Minneapolis? People who worked hard to promote a radical leftward shift toward Pacifism were about as welcome as the James-Younger gang.

You say you want a Revolution? Good luck starting a revolution in Minneapolis. Even a hippy who is not a fake, and sincerely wants to change the world for the better, is going to be stumped by all the Dunder-Mifflin heads one finds in Minnesota's corporate environment.

Minneapolis is the home of some huge multinational corporations, like Honeywell, 3M, USBank, Alliant Tech Systems, General Mills, and Cray Inc. Alliant Tech Systems was famous for making cluster bombs -- the kind that blew the legs off little kids in Vietnam.

They were welcome in Minneapolis. Pacifists were not.

Downtown Minneapolis in the mid-1980s certainly looked like a wholesome episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show, shot at the IDS Tower. But when the Cohen brothers paid a visit a decade later to make their black comedy Fargo (1996), they twigged pretty quickly to the underlying weirdness.

Underneath all that Minnesota Nice is something deeply subgenius, pervy and not nice at all: A buncha friendly but paranoid "normal" people willing to commit mass murder.

Finding a "nice" place to live was my first task.

The only hip neighborhood in Minneapolis is Dinkytown -- the university district. My friends from Northfield called it "the Carleton Ghetto" because many of them were attending graduate school there. I found a flat on 4th Street -- the street that gave Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Positively 4th Street" its name.

After taking an Extension course on magazine writing, I wound up writing articles for a duck art magazine. Definitely a Grail mission fail.

But I fought on. Signed up for a master's degree in journalism, and joined the staff of the Minnesota Daily, then hidden in the basement of the Journalism school on Church Street. Circulation: 40,000. Practically a real newspaper!

Before being Shot Down in Flames, I did manage to team with Monika Bauerlein, a star reporter at the Minnesota Daily (now an editor with Mother Jones magazine) on a glorious series of articles exposing how the U.S. Army intended to use the university's supercomputer center to design a wide variety of Top Secret weapons systems.

Minneapolis is a major center for high-performance computing because it is the home of Cray Inc., a supercomputers firm that was established by Seymour Cray in 1976 after he graduated from the U of M's engineering school -- right across the street from the Hubbard School of Journalism.

The Army granted the University of Minnesota $66.9 million and in return wanted to use their supercomputers to design and game out "Star Wars" -- the militarization of outer space. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (called SDI or Star Wars) was named after the very first Star Wars movie, which was released in 1977.

As an assistant researcher and interviewer, I called DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and at least a dozen high-security military weapons laboratories across the United States, seeking comments, asking probing questions and probably earning myself a nice thick dossier at the local FBI in the process.

Monika won a very well-deserved SPJ/SDX award for her excellent reporting on the Army grant. The entire Army Grant series was designed and overseen by the Daily's talented editor-in-chief, Dan Eggen, who now works with the Washington Post.

In addition to an SPJ/SDX award we also got funny comments from students who scrawled graffiti on the walls of the walkways over the Mississippi River between east campus and west campus: "Why is everyone complaining about Amy Grant? I like Amy Grant!"

Sigh.

Some Kind of Wonderful

This was the late 1980s. The year that Some Kind of Wonderful came out.

About that time, one of my co-workers at the Minnesota Daily, a brilliant and talented writer who rose from the depths of Lake Minnehaha like Nimüe, clutching Excalibur in her hands, said boo and asked me out on a date.

Surprised (this had never happened to me before), I gladly agreed. We went out for a picnic. Perhaps inspired by Lick The Tins' punk version of the song "Can't Help Falling In Love," I completely fell for M. She really was a vision "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," and as far as I was concerned, a dream come true.

I thought we were well matched, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. She was completely charming. We were made for each other.

Or, rather, we were connected somehow by some shared and vaguely remembered "dream" from our very deep past. How can I describe this? She was not like Annie Hall so much as she was like an Alice in Wonderland, an Alice sadly wandering through the fields of Elysium, in search of a lost loved one.

I thought: Here is one of my Druid kin, popping up out of the woods, a beautiful young woman, and adorable. All I knew is that I recognized her somehow as a very important part of my life in the past, and a very important piece of the puzzle that is my life at present.

Let me put it this way: Perhaps one does not have to believe in reincarnation. Perhaps our DNA, the map of the world that inhabits every cell of our body, contains a holographic map or "Hall of Records" of everything that ever happened to our ancient ancestors, recorded like a memory.

If that is the case, then something in every cell of me was saying: This is a match. This is a woman I am meant to serve -- with my entire life, if necessary.

The day after an explosive 4th of July holiday, I asked the mysterious Miss Marvelous to marry me, and was amazed when she said yes. For about a month, I was on Cloud 9.

That cloud soon darkened. M travelled to Denver to attend the Denver Publishing Institute and while she was there she met with my brother, Michael, who was going through his Boulder Hippy art student phase. He probably told her his version of our family history.

When she returned, her attitude was odd. Different.

If I had only looked at M's own family and heritage, I might have understood why. She was Norwegian all the way back to the 19th century, and Lutheran. Her family embodied that sometimes cold but always kind-hearted and lovely Lutheran culture that I had seen across town at St. Olaf's College, the Minnesotan culture invoked by Garrison Keillor in his wonderful "Lake Wobegone" stories.

The way Keillor (a graduate of the University of Minnesota's journalism school) once put it, the whole point behind Scandinavian culture is to be "more normal than the kid sitting next to you."

Are they uncomfortable with eccentric? O yah!

Perhaps my brother Mike had told her that my parents were Catholic, but divorced. Perhaps she had heard about the Russian-Jewish branch of our family tree. Perhaps she herself had deduced that I am koo-koo for Coco-Puffs.

Who knows? Bottom line: There was a lot about my personality and my family's history that simply does not always sit very well with conservative Norwegian and Lutheran families in Minnesota.

The match was awkward.

But I was certain that she was kind, intelligent, and no religious bigot. Her concern seemed to center on a much more important, and reasonable question. Did I really love her?

One afternoon she surprised me by putting me to a simple test. It was probably an idea she found in Redbook while getting her hair done and reading an article titled "10 Ways to Discover If He Really Loves You!"

I later realized that it was a perfectly legitimate Grail Test -- that is, a love test or assay. Back in the middle ages, a woman was allowed to "test a knight's metal" to see if he was gold or fool's gold, by sending him out on a quest, or by posing a riddle.

While I was seated in a chair, she stood behind me and covered my eyes with her hands.

"Mark," she asked in her dulcet tones, "what color are my eyes?"

I paused. Far too long. But the question was unfair! She had these sad, beautiful eyes that were changing constantly like the water in a crystal clear lake. Their color depended upon her mood and what the sky and the light were doing that day.

"Blue?"

Wrong answer. From that day forward, her eyes were the color of a storm at sea -- like the glint of sunlight on a cold Norwegian fjord.

Thanks, Redbook!

Seriously: The barometric pressure began to fall, and her mood became turbulent. She became standoffish. She began to invent excuses to leave me alone for entire weekends.

Her sister, father and mother were trying to keep her home more often. They did not like the large amounts of time we were spending together -- we could not even snuggle and hug without being interrupted by a phone call from her mom, asking if M had seen one of her father's shirts.

I laughed at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't funny. They were putting some serious pressure on her.

One night she gave me a call, and was weeping -- there were tears going into the receiver -- yet she wouldn't say why. I felt as confused as Sir Perceval at Montsalvat, being confronted by a Grail maiden with an emotional puzzle: How should I respond to her tears?

I fumbled for the right answer. I had no idea how to comfort M.

Why was she crying? I didn't have a clue.

Grail Test Fail No. 2. Telepathic empathy skills: zero. In terms of sympathetic vibrational physics, I felt enormous sympathy for her. But the message received was entirely cryptic. A paradox. I could not for the life of me fathom why she was weeping.

Psychic foresight: 1. I knew we were in trouble. Something was wrong.

Black Swan Event

A couple weeks later we were invited to Stub & Herb's for lunch by her friends. A bolt-from-the-blue hit me as I was biting into my Fried Chicken Sandwich on brioche. One of the women present suddenly "staged an intervention" and bluntly informed me that M. had slept with three other men at the Daily. She named names.

Wide-eyed and confused, I looked at my sweetie and saw that she was staring at her feet and blushing furiously. Was her sweet-and-sour sauce too hot?

No!

She was trembling.

I began to realize with alarm that something was genuinely and terribly wrong. I stuttered, lamely, in her defence, that I did not mind if I were not the first, or that she had loved three other men, I myself had loved three other women. I only hoped that I should be M's last love.

M was trying hard not to cry. She got up quickly and left. This was way too embarrassing.

In other words, I had said exactly the wrong thing. M's female friends looked at each other nervously. Ooo.

By failing to go out the door after her, I failed Grail Test No. 3.

They had just told me that M had betrayed me, and I had just told them that it didn't matter. My love for M would be as constant as the Northern Star.

I was telling the truth: She is still near the center of my heart, and I love her and remember her fondly to this day, 35 years later. She left a very deep impression on me.

But I instantly dismissed as unimportant some pretty serious accusations -- and from M's point of view, that must have looked like I instantly accepted those accusations as true. This was not a resounding show of faith in M's personal integrity. I had just blindly accepted the judgment of this "committee of swans" and did not seek M's point of view.

Neither did I go after her to explain: Her past did not matter to me. All I wanted was to be with her from this day forward. To honor her, to love her and to serve her.

Instead, I sat and listened to the dark song of the swans, transfixed. They apologized for intervening this way, but explained that when they learned from M that we were engaged to marry they had become alarmed.

They understood that I was kind, shy, morally conservative (ha!), raised Catholic, and probably expected some form of ho-hum monogamous relationship with M. Given what they knew about her love for the dashing waves of wild romance, and her desire to go a-Viking every other weekend, my own visions of a future life of cozy domestic bliss with her were probably delusional.

It wasn't going to happen. Not even if I managed to buy a Chain-o-Lakes condo on Lake Minnehaha with two-door garage attached -- something i could not possibly afford.

They had gathered from M that her family objected to our match. Her mother, especially. M came from a nice family (translation: A Lutheran family). They thought that their daughter could do "much better" than a Mark Shernick. So they were pressuring M to end things.

When M's friends heard her say this, they grew concerned that she had set me up to take a very hard fall. So they had agreed to intervene.

They suggested that, in view of M's boy-crazy promiscuity, we really were not a terribly good match. It might be best for both of us to have a long, serious chat and reconsider our engagement. Okay? They were telling me this for my own good.

They wished me luck. With that they awkwardly begged to be excused and vanished.

Fried Chicken

I sat there frozen over my fried chicken sandwich.

I could not -- would not -- believe this was happening. M would not cheat on me. Nor was she a religious bigot.

But the way she had blushed and left the restaurant -- like Jesse James trying to get out of Northfield fast -- suggested it might actually be true. I found my head spinning, like Woody Allen in a neurotic anxiety spiral.

M had casually informed me once, that one of her theatre friends had called her "a 1980s reincarnation of Holly Golightly."

Come to think of it, that was not a good sign. It meant M not only looked cool in sunglasses -- she might also have a tendency to expertly fleece men and leave them angrily pounding on her door while she hid inside her apartment exclaiming "Quel rat!"

As for coming from a nice family: They were right. Her family were lovely. She did have a handsome home, because her dad was an airline mechanic, her mom an educator.

Is it possible she found out that my family had some Jewish heritage and this somehow made a big difference to her mom and dad?

Had M actually slept with three of our friends at the office? Was I myself just another rat in her eyes? Was she some kind of deranged nymphomaniac starring in her very own Bret Easton Ellis novel -- a brat pack masterpiece complete with a soundtrack by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions?

I thought about the mix tape that she had given me, and some of the song choices began to make more sense. Why had she chosen "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole?

"Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart? Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep. They just lie there, and they die there. Are you warm? Are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?"

The next morning, M. called me on my phone (we still had landlines back then) and set a time to come over to my place. When she arrived, she said she hoped we could part amicably.

Urrrr? Did she just say part? Amicably? As in FRIENDS?

Obviously, she said, she was dealing with some serious issues and emotional problems, and in her view I myself had a "Hamlet problem."

My heart sank like an elevator dropping 12 stories in 2 seconds. So much for discussion. She had already made up her mind. This was it. What I had feared the most: The Long Goodbye.

Suddenly another song choice on her mix tape made sense: If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? by Mental As Anything.

I tried to hold back the tears. Wasn't able to.

And I was puzzled by that last remark. Hamlet problem? What Hamlet problem? Was this some sort of idea my brother Michael had put in her head?

I loved her, I said.

"Yeah, right. Could we speed this up a little? I've got to get to class."

Um. Okay. I loved her. But I understood very clearly why neither of us could move forward.

"Excellent."

Her parents were interfering and objecting to me, because I was poor. My brother Mike may have interfered and raised some doubts in her mind.

"Yup."

And now an entire group of her trusted friends had just urged me to call it off. They were doing this "for my own good."

"Exactly! So glad you understand."

I should be happy we had shared a beautiful and very hot summer together.

"Hee! Mmm. Well . . . . It was nice."

In tears, I said that I had thought long and hard about it, and reached the difficult conclusion that our friends were probably right. We probably were not very well matched. And, in the end, all that really mattered to me was that she should be happy in life. Okay?

"Okay! Great. I was afraid you would take this the wrong way. Well, I'm off to class. Ta, Mark! Sois bien sage, d'accord?"

I wished her a goodbye, and let her go.

She checked her watch and left my apartment quickly, leaving only a hint of expensive rose perfume (Anais by Cacherel?) behind. During the next weeks she packed up her things and left the Minnesota Daily offices as well.

I felt like Holly Golightly's nameless cat, left in the rain.

Operation Double Cross

How could I have been so stupid? To think -- to hope -- that it might work, and that our families and friends would not interfere?

I had been deftly shunted into the discard bin. Amongst the many romantic adventures of her own life, my scenes had been abruptly relegated to the DVD Extras. The comical flubs section, probably.

In the book version of Breakfast at Tiffany's (not the movie version), Holly Golightly simply jets off to Brazil and never comes back.

Truman Capote got it right: The Hollies of the Jet-Set 1960s simply left you and never came back. They would rocket out to Rio. That was that. You were left behind hunting for Holly's cat.

But the Hollies of the 1980s? Why should they inconvenience themselves by leaving? They had a tendency, like Truman's Swans of the 1970s, to simply continue swanning around the very same social circles and parties, pretending there wasn't a dead man floating face down in their pool.

A month later I learned from mutual friends at the Daily that my former fiancee had "a new gig" -- M. had moved on to a talented sculptor, someone dishy she had met at an art gallery.

There was even a rumor that they were engaged to marry.

This news floored me. I couldn't believe it. Was it possible that a month after she had broken off her engagement to me she was engaged once again? That was pretty fast work, even for a sharp East Ender like M!

I suddenly realized what I should have seen from the start: My sweetheart had been two-timing. Those weekends when she had gone missing? She had been out at parties, and had never stopped "husband shopping."

I had been double-crossed.

This artful dodger had probably scoped Mr. Chiseler and his testworthy toolkit long before breaking up with me. Which meant . . . the entire luncheon, and the story about her flings with three other men?

Un conte de fées. A fairytale. An invention.

There was indeed an intervention, but it was not an intervention designed to protect poor Mark from taking a painful fall. M's circle of Dinkytown Swans had helped her to give yours truly the Big Push -- the old heave-ho.

My guess: The Swans had had a new man waiting in the wings all along -- someone they had probably spotted and chosen for her.

What a sap I had been! To M. our engagement was no different from shopping for clothing at a Target department store, making a selection, then abruptly throwing that selection back on the sales counter when she found a lovely new item she liked oh-so-much better.

She hadn't exactly fought very hard to keep me, now had she? Simply left me in a rumpled heap. Miss Felicity Cutpurse had certainly made short work of me.

Gobstopping! As all this miching malicho sank in, my boiling blood began to chill to subzero and turned to ice. Quel rat!

The next time M. came in to visit the Daily's "Thursday Night Club" (the beer party that followed completion of the last newspaper of the week) I confronted her and we had a full, loud and frank exchange of honest opinions, right in front of the entire editorial staff.

Some of the men on staff secretly understood why I was steaming. To quote Raymond Chandler: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

Or, to quote John Barrymore: "Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock."

I had just discovered that M. looked like a ripe haddock. She was behaving not at all like Lady Guinevere or the deep soul mate of my druid dreams and very much more like a Light Street tart.

I blew my stack. I chewed her out. This time it was her turn to leave in tears, the emotions clawing at her shocked face like a wide-eyed kitten hanging onto a screen door, afraid of falling.

I thought I would never see her ghost again.

But, surprisingly, a few weeks later, she zoomed by the Daily office and crossed eerily like a phantom across the doorway -- a very rare appearance -- looking tearful, desperate, and frightened.

The Woman in White

What was wrong? Had someone died?

She saw that I was watching her, blanched with fear and then quickly flitted out the exit. Strangely, my heart went with her.

For during the last few weeks I had repented of my hard-hearted assessment of her. Something told me that my initial impression, that I had met the living embodiment of an ancient Celtic love story, was correct. She was deeply engraved, somehow, onto every cell of my DNA. I was not going to be able to just erase her over night.

She was the living image of a very deep memory -- one that was not going to go away at all.

I couldn't help but feel like the night traveller in Wilkie Collins gothic mystery novel The Woman in White when he is startled in the woods to find a beautiful mad woman racing in the moonlight amongst the darkened trees. She crosses his path, causing his horse to rear, and only pauses long enough to give him a terrified glance before continuing her pell-mell flight.

How intriguing! What did this mean?

I began to worry. I had never seen M. look so haggard and scared. Was she in trouble?

She had probably popped in to find her best friend, D. But D was out.

I decided not to follow M -- that would only upset her -- but decided I might help her by giving D a call, telling her that M apparently wanted to speak with her.

Come to think of it, I wanted to speak with D myself.

I rang the number in the staff directory. No answer. Then I noticed the street address -- only a short bus ride away -- and thought: "Time for a long talk with D. Perhaps she can shed some light on this."

Also, I wanted to confirm once and for all: Were the rumors true? Was M engaged? Was there any hope left for me?

Sword through the Heart

Getting dumped leaves one in a state of emotional agony -- a state of extremely confused and contradictory urges. You are skewered, paralyzed and unable to do anything about it -- bound like a miserable prisoner by mind-forged manacles, something that psychologists call an an approach-avoidance conflict.

In high school we had once translated a short and pithy poem by Catullus, No. 85, titled Odi et Amo: "I hate and I love. Don't ask why I do it. My pain proves it's true. That's all there is to it."

Catullus was right: You can hate someone and feel so hurt and angry at them you want to strangle them, and yet at the same time tell yourself that you love them with all your mind, all your strength and all your heart.

The two feelings are entirely contradictory yet very powerful and urgent, and that's what drives you bats. On one hand, the knuckles read L-O-V-E. On the other hand, the knuckles read H-A-T-E.

Poets back to the days of ancient Rome have given us a simple explanation for why the self becomes deeply divided. Simple: Rejected love cuts your heart in two. It splits your mind in half. The deep injustice of a true love betrayed feels exactly like an arrow or a sword piercing straight through the center of your heart. It pins you.

In the analogy and symbolism of the Holy Grail, it has been compared to the Spear of Longinus, which pierces through the heart of Christ and pins him to the cross.

Put much more simply:

Love hurts.

What do you do when jilted? Women have the very same problem.

This is a major theme running through dozens of songs about women who have been abused, jilted, or used and cast aside. Joan Baez, in particular, does a fine job of voicing a jilted woman's complaint in her ballads "The Queen of Hearts" and "Silver Dagger."

Here are the lyrics from Joan's YouTube performance of The Queen of Hearts.

"To the queen of hearts he's the ace of sorrow. He's here today, he's gone tomorrow. Young men are plenty but sweethearts few. If my love leaves me what shall I do?"

What shall I do? What shall I do? That plaint summarizes neatly the utter despair of rejection and the confusing central question that tortures a person caught in the cross of an extreme approach-avoidance conflict.

In the same way, the violence that men do to women drives women mad -- especially if they feel paralyzed or trapped in a marriage to an adulterous male.

Baez's ballad Silver Dagger expresses that madness neatly, and it is an emotional knot or chain that is very familiar to many families.

The mother, having been abused by men in past, becomes paranoid and hyper-protective of her daughters. She won't let her daughters go anywhere near men, or she insists on controlling every aspect of their courtship and marriage.

An intelligent daughter often chafes at this parental control -- especially if she has reached college age and is still living at home with mom and dad. She may become extremely rebellious. But this puts her into an extremely painful approach-avoidance conflict of her own: She can either please her mother or please her lover. She cannot please them both. She is being forced to choose.

Without the proper training, Minnesotan Grail maidens who lie at the bottom of Lake Minnehaha are also in quite a severe bind. The waves are chilling, and the sword Excalibur is sharp. It cuts their hands to the bone.

I believe that I ran into exactly such an OCD mom and rebellious daughter when I began courting M. I failed to recognize the problem in time. Only many, many years later, when I was watching the 2017 coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird, starring the delightful Saoirse Ronan, did I realize "My God! That's exactly the situation that M was enduring with her mother!"

Perhaps I was so near-sighted because my own family had similar issues. My parents divorced when I was only 10. The finding, by modern psychologists, that dysfunctional families lack clear and honest communications, and tend to drive children crazy with diabolically cruel double-binds, double-talk and double-speak rings true.

The emotional knots that resulted were complex. The dysfunctions in M's family were possibly much different from the dysfunctions in my family. But the emotional pain that resulted was very plain and simple: Love hurts.

Psychic wounds -- wounds to "the heart" -- are very real. The destruction of King Arthur's Round Table had much more to do with diabolical double-bind of adultery, or the suspicion of adultery (a wicked knot!) -- than the loss of a single wine cup.

In Christian theology, a sin against the Holy Spirit of love is a form of mortal sin precisely for this reason: It kills the spirit. It kills your soul. It creates mental and emotional dissonance.

It's an accusation of adultery, not the loss of a wine cup, that destroyed the Round Table. Dissonance, when amplified, can shatter every wine glass in the room!

What broke their circle of faith was the evil rumor that Queen Gwenwhyfar had betrayed Arthur with his best friend, Sir Lancelot. That claim of adultery tore the Round Table apart, and sent Sir Lancelot reeling into exile and madness.

My problem with the MInnesota Daily? It was not a newspaper so much as a gossip mill, and the staff were all learning to become experts on spinning out sharp, soul-killing rumors: The kind that desttroy reputations. The kind that destroy lives.

The Daily was simply a Dinkytown version of the royal courts of Russia, France and Denmark in the 19th Century -- atrocious gossip mills, full of cutthroat diplomacy, intrigue and political conspiracy, fueled by alcohol, cocaine, sex, or -- in the Daily's case -- Leinenkugel's beer.

An injury to the heart is what Hamlet means by "the pangs of despised love." He means that rejected love can drive us mad with grief. Dissonance destroys us.

Love will tear us apart.

I can now attest to this:

Love and hate do not cancel out each other and leave you in peace. On the contrary, love and hate go to war with each other, tearing up your heart and leaving your mind entirely squelched and unbalanced -- nearly insane with grief.

My heart was torn. My grievance was real. My imagination had run amok. I thought IS THIS LOVE? Should I approach M? Should I avoid M?"

Believe it or not, I was still holding a torch for her hoping that we might reconcile. Something deep within me told me to hold to that original dream of her that had impelled me toward her in the first place: That deep DNA dream from the Hall of Records that probably leads all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

I had been shallow, mean and false to the deeper reality of the eternal spirit of our ancestors. I felt very badly about shouting at her and wanted to make things right somehow.

Chasing M didn't look like the way to go. The 1982 murder of my beloved high school classmate, actress Dominique Dunne (1959 - 1982), had, at least, taught me that much! Best to seek help -- ask D's advice and talk to D as an intermediary.

The Green Mill

After several rings, D answered the door and we went across the street to the Green Mill for coffee. Let's just say that the scene that followed left me in no doubt whatever that I was no longer welcome in M's life.

D confirmed everything.

Yes, M had slept with three or four of our co-workers. Yes she was seeing someone new, and yes they were engaged. No she was not interested in reconciling with me. In fact, the very opposite was true. Our argument had scared the hell out of her. As far as both M and D were concerned, I was just another Rusty Trawler -- a jilted lover pounding on her door.

In fact, after our shouting match at the Daily, M was convinced that I had gone psycho, like Glenn Close in the movie Fatal Attraction (1987). I should take a hint and take a hike.

The gravity of this news bounced off my head like an Apple i-Phone bouncing off the head of Sir Isaac Newton. Hello! Ouch! She really was engaged?

I was just beginning to process this horrible fact when I was surprised to see M. entering the front door of the Green Mill with a police officer in tow. Unbeknownst to me, M and her new boyfriend had been inside D's apartment when I arrived, and they were convinced I was there to murder them.

They had called the police. D had kept me busy talking while the policeman arrived.

M. and the policeman marched up to my table and M. yelled, in a very loud voice, for all the restaurant to hear, that I should leave her alone. "Leave me alone!"

Then the policeman asked me what I thought I was doing.

"What?" I paused in stunned silence. The whole restaurant was now watching us.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. I said I thought I was having coffee with a friend.

"Okay, well, uh . . . Then keep it friendly. And you are to leave this young lady here alone. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "I would be happy to leave her alone."

With that, M and the policeman left. There was some chuckling at the table next to ours. "Do you guys always bring the police on your dates?"

Mortified, D and I ignored them, paid the tab, and left. I gave D a hug, and asked her to please tell M that this was all a big misunderstanding. I had not been aware that she and her friend were at D.'s apartment. In fact I had only just learned, five minutes ago, that he really existed. I meant them no harm.

Then I went home and did what any reasonable man would do: I put my head in my hands and cried like a baby. I had never felt more humiliated, rejected and crushed in all my life.

My Hamlet Problem, or The Unfair Ophelia

What had I been thinking? "She'll Come Back to Me"? All my hopes for a happy life with M had just been dealt a death blow. Shattered.

When there were no more tears, I stared blankly at the wall for a couple of hours. Then I calmly went to a local drugstore and bought a bottle of sleeping pills. Brought them home. Set them on the kitchen table. Just stared at them.

To be, or not to be?

I laughed bitterly. Well, what do you know? M. was right. I really did have a Hamlet problem.

The problem was: Hamlet truly loved the unfair Ophelia. With all his heart. And that's why she was driving him crazy.

Because Ophelia did not love Hamlet in return. In fact, she had no intention whatever to marry him and was a willing tool and an informant in the hands of the King's men, a blunt instrument being used by Polonius and a group of fat-boy conspirators who were spying on Prince Hamlet -- and who weren't very good at their job of spying.

Their toes were showing beneath the curtains where they were hiding.

Hamlet knew with a dead certainty that agent Ophelia was working for The Enemy: His step-father, the King. All hope of any love from her had been obliterated. She was on the wrong team.

Yet Hamlet loved Ophelia anyway. Loved her madly.

What a perfect analogy! M was dumping me like a bag of garbage. She had used and betrayed me in the most cold and horrible way that one human being can betray another.

Yet I loved her anyway. I was still entirely captivated by her charm.

Was it really necessary to be so cruel, and reject me so loudly in front of an entire restaurant full of people and a cop? No.

Had she ever loved me at all? Apparently not!

So why ever had she asked me out at all? Why?

Why Why Why

That's the question that was now deeply vexing me. It drove me mad. She had seemed to be such a lovely and intelligent person. Why would she ask me out, romance me, wine and dine me, if she didn't really love me?

And there, like the curly-toed shoes of Polonius poking out from under the curtain, was the answer.

She was an agent. She wasn't acting on her own behalf. She was doing whatever her nasty little circle of Dinkytown Swans suggested. They were deciding everything by committee!

But why would this strange committee of Dinkytown Swans use her and send M after me? Who were these people?

Within the space of an hour, I had figured it out: M had seduced and slept with the Daily's managing editor. Through him had gained the post of assistant managing editor. With this position, she had complete oversight access on the entire email system at the Minnesota Daily, meaning she could read all emails going in and out from all the reporters.

I knew this for a fact: When we were still a couple, I had watched her doing her AME job, and effortlessly accessing other people's stories and email.

This in turn meant she was sitting in the catbird seat for spying on every single reporter in the office, dipping into their story queues and personnel files. She could print out any interview notes or reporter contact list she wanted, and hand it off to the police, the FBI or any agency interested in snooping.

Her friend D? The leader of the Swans of Dinkytown? Was a member of one of the most powerful and conservative business families in Minnesota. The University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management was named after them. State Auditor Arne Carlson was a member of D's family tree.

Cherchez La Tree

Aha! Cherchez la family tree. My mistake had been viewing both M and D as isolated individuals, neglecting their network, their politics, their religion, their values and their social context. These weren't witches. Worse!

These were Young Republicans.

Arne Carlson was the Republican nemesis of Paul Wellstone, one of my political science professors at Carleton College. They had recently duked it out in a very hotly fought race for the position of State Auditor.

The Carlsons were major movers and shakers in the local Republican Party -- Reagan's crowd. My sworn enemies.

They had tagged me as a leftie, and bagged me. In short, M was not only a seducer of men at the Daily, she was an informant. An agent. A honey trapper. A spy.

This was all political. Why had she been so cold to me? Because her crowd detested people like me. The Young Republicans of the 1980s were a federation of nationalists who strongly supported Reagan's pro-German policy. Their network in many ways overlapped the neo-Nazi movement in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Europe.

See Russ Bellant's book Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party (Boston, MA: Southend Press, 1991). Note in particular the chapter on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists -- a neo-fascist group of Ukrainians who strongly supported Reagan's long-term plan to join Germany in an effort to overrun Ukraine and Russia with NATO troops.

My own family was deeply divided by the civil war within Ukraine: My mother's family being German-speakers from western Ukraine who would probably support the OUN, my father's family being Jewish Ukrainians who were massacred by OUN partisans in the small town of Mizoch in 1942. They were rabidly opposed to Reagan's plan.

When Paul Wellstone (1944 - 2002), the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants Leon and Minnie Wellstone, ran against Arne Carlson in 1982, he made many far-right enemies in Minneapolis. When he later became a U.S. Senator for the state of Minnesota, George Bush had loudly asked one of his friends in the room "Who is this chickenshit?"

If I was a Jewish-looking Ukrainian who had studied under Paul Wellstone at Carleton, then the local Young Republicans and their friends in the local chapter of the OUN suspected that I was wearing red Russian underwear.

They sent M to find out. Whether she knew it or not, she was being used as a cat's paw, an informant, by some people within her tight little circle of Swans.

The police showing up so suddenly and promptly to protect M? They were probably her real employers! I had just been scoped and profiled by an unknown but extremely conservative component of the Young Republicans in Minnesota, and they were probably acting as a vigilante group that handed all info collected on leftists at the Minnesota Daily to the local Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit.

M's only interest in seducing me had been getting all the personal information she could get on me, my family and my network of friends. And once she had that, she bailed.

I sat looking at the bottle of sleeping pills for a long time.

It was only when I thought of my family -- and how hurt they would be -- that I finally pitched the bottle into a trash bin. Why let the cruel hearts win?

Clearly I had lost M. But I still loved my family. I didn't want to hurt them.

For the next month, I was profoundly depressed, It was as if the Sun itself had gone out. All the sunshine went out of my life. It was hard even to get up in the morning or find the motivation to go to work.

But gradually I recovered.

And then I launched into the Army Grant story mentioned above. I wasn't going to give up without a fight!

If the Reagan crowd were trying to militarize outer space, and if they were hijacking a publicly funded supercomputer center at the University of Minnesota to do it, putting the life-time work of dozens of neutral science professors at risk of being zapped with the Army's "classified research" wand, then the public had the right to know.

If the university was allowing the U.S. Army to use these supercomputers to design a new generation of superweapons, the whole world genuinely needed to know. These weapons might pose a risk to every single man, woman and child on the planet.

The University of Minnesota was, in fact, one of a dozen universities that had secretly participated in the Army's Manhattan Project during World War II. Professor Alfred O.C. Nier, a physicist at the U of M, used mass spectrometry to isolated U-235 in laboratories just down the street from our journalism school. Nier had mailed his samples to Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.

Was the university now participating in a new Manhattan Project? Working on a new generation of superweapons that put our world at risk? Our Daily team set out to discover all we could.

Genetic Weapons: Potentially Scarier than Nukes

I can't summarize the whole series here. But there is one interview that Monika Bauerlein and I did together that stays with me to this day. We met with the dean of the university's IT department, Ettore "Jim" Infante, and he said something that surprised us both.

He said that the potential use of supercomputing to game out Star Wars did not scare him half so much as what the Army's biolabs might do with genetic weapons. "We are very near to sequencing the entire human genome, and when that happens . . . ." He paused, and his eyes got wide, as if staring into The Abyss. "Yikes!"

In fact the Human Genome Project completed its international effort to identify, map, and sequence all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint in 2003.

We are now well past our second decade of laboratory experiments with the manipulation -- and weaponization -- of human genetics. Many of dean Jim Infante's worst nightmares are well on their way to becoming true nightmares.

But Monika and I remained largely focused on the potential destruction that could result from Star Wars, and the militarization of outer space.

The international neutrality of space was at risk, and the possibility that a wide variety of spy satellites, beam weapons and nukes might soon be hovering over our heads seemed only too real, even way back in 1989.

Gorbachev's Visit

On 3 June 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev paid a visit to the Twin Cities, shaking hands and working the crowd. Several reporters from the Minnesota Daily attended the events.

I am pretty convinced that, during that time period, someone sold or handed off to the Russians all of the information that we student reporters had so painstakingly gathered on the university's Army Grant.

Why do I think this? Because we were hacked.

One morning, right in the middle of the Army Grant story, as we were pushing our deadline to complete the series, I logged onto my terminal at the Minnesota Daily to find a dozen different automated messages indicating "unauthorized access" to all of my files.

This meant the attack came from the outside of our system. It was not simply a managing editor or Assistant Managing Editor looking over our shoulders. This was different. Entire files had been copied and extracted.

M was long gone by that time. I was sure that it was not her. But here, once again, I was bitterly confronted with the consequence of working on serious, front-line news in the middle of a field where reporters are fighting hard to get their hands on military information hidden by defense contractors.

If you performed your "watch dog" function well, as a reporter, and succeeded in serving the citizens of the United States by uncovering the details of a Star Wars contract, absolutely nothing prevented all of your hard work from going straight into the hands of some unnamed, masked agency, that could break into your files and rifle through them, taking God knows what and why.

We were information raped.

This hacking incident forced me to confront a very hard reality: After working hard to inform the public about a high-performance computer system at the University of Minnesota that was designing doomsday scenarios in outer space, the reaction we got was a dinky SPJ/SDX award (a pat on the head) and a bunch of nervous joking. "Why is everyone complaining about Amy Grant? I like Amy Grant!"

Given the huge amounts of time I had put into this project, I could have made more money per hour working at a McDonald's.

As for social impact: I sometimes got the impression that Brother Jedd and Sister Cindy, two holy rollers often seen on the front steps of the Kauffman Student Center declaring that they had found "The King of Kings at Burger King" were doing a better job grabbing public attention and working for social change.

Who was I fooling? After we got done firing our spitballs at the U.S. Army, they just ran over us like a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Meanwhile, if your girlfriend isn't dumping you because her family thinks you are a leftist loser wearing red underwear, then you have to deal with the fact that the Russian GRU may indeed be dipping into your files and offloading all the information you just gathered into their files -- putting your country, your family, her family, and all of those flippant readers you were supposedly "serving" at serious military risk.

Who was I really serving? The reading public? Or the Soviet GRU?

M had been right to leave me for a sculptor.

This was a foolhardy quest. Even President Gorbachev forgot to send me a Thank You card. Probably because the Soviet GRU listed reporters like me under the heading "useful idiot."

A Winter of Discontent

I dropped out of graduate school -- all but my master's thesis completed -- and left journalism forever.

Truth and lies? They both used the same make-up kit, the same expensive perfumes and colognes. They wear the same designer clothes.

After being completely blindsided by an extremely talented faker, I no longer trusted my own radar. I no longer trusted journalists, period.

I no longer trusted me.

I quit the Daily. I got an "honest" job at the post office. A blue collar job.

A responsible guy has to repay his student loans, right? I still believed in honor.

But love? Ha! Not for me.

The plastic rings from gum ball machines? Not for me. You can keep 'em. Or put 'em in a box, tie 'em with a ribbon, and throw 'em in the deep blue sea.

I sorted mail for, oh, about five years. If you ask Charles Bukowski, the author of Post Office (Black Sparrow Press, 1971), I probably would have been better off committing suicide.

To paraphrase his book: "There was this guy, told me about jobs at the postal service? I'm still looking for that guy."

Did I mention it gets damned cold in Minnesota?

After keying zip codes all night at the downtown post office, while walking back home at 3 a.m., I would sometimes walk past the ice sculptures of fairies and angels on the Nicollet Mall and wonder:

What would happen if you kissed one?

Hm. I imagined I would be stuck for hours, like one of those kids who gets his tongue frozen to the monkey bars at school. The mall police might find me an hour later, and release me. Send me home embarrassed.

That idea stuck with me, because it summarized Minnesota rather neatly: If you are a skilled ice sculptor, there is hope. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993), you will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your skills and improve your talents.

If you are a postal clerk, fantasizing about slobbering on another person's work of art, you might want to reconsider your career choice -- and your social skills. It's best to look, but not touch.

For me, MInnesota was a beautiful ice angel that I could admire, but not touch.

Still, when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and I put in for a hardship transfer to Seattle in 1996, I was surprised by how much it hurt to leave the Twin Cities.

"On my last day in Minneapolis," I told her, "I thought how much I would miss all of my friends there, and I got tears in my eyes. Then, the wind started blowing. The tears froze on my eyes lashes."

"Okay!" I thought. "I'm not going to miss Minneapolis that much!"

Emerald City

I was right.

Moved to Washington State, and the Emerald City. So nice! Weird thing is, Seattle is north of Minneapolis, yet they are always green and warm there.

It rains a lot.

I worked in the photo studio at Amazon, helping them load lots of pictures of junk onto their website. Then I got a job sorting mail on the 30th floor of a tall, downtown skyscraper.

Remember the great Nisqually Earthquake of February 28, 2001? A 6.8 that felt more like a 7.2. It set that skyscraper to rockin' back and forth, back and forth. We were actually scraping the sky, which is something that skyscrapers were NEVER meant to do, and I thought: Oh hell no.

Opt: Out.

After my mother passed away, I moved back to Colorado. Worked in Denver. It was Denver. Then I moved to KC, to be closer to my mom's family. It's definitely not Denver.

Returning to Kansas

The last decade of my life can be summed up neatly by watching Bill Murray in the comedy classic Broken Flowers (2005), a painfully accurate dissection of Aging Guy angst with a wonderful soundtrack by Holly Golightly.

Her song There's An End has been my theme song for the past 20 years.

Bittersweet.

Yeah. I guess I became lost in sad movies.

But gradually, oh so gradually, I was recovering from my deep depressions, the Blue Period that followed the loss of my mom. I had rejoined the Catholic Church, despite all the bad press it has received constantly for decades, because I became intrigued by a simple idea:

What if the people who followed this religion for more than 2,000 years were not completel idiots? What if old granddad was not entirely wrong? What if it's our own generation of know-it-alls, who reason with their heads but do not their hearts who have it all wrong?

What does it mean to have "a seeing heart"?

I went back to all my old notes on King Arthur and the Holy Grail cycle, watched the movie version of the DaVinci Code, and strangely found great comfort in all of the ancient art, rhythm and rituals of the Catholic Church.

When combined with the legends of the Holy Grail, the majestic beauty of cathedral choirs and colorful illumination of stained glass brought comfort to my heart. Why was this?

Because the practice of regular singing and choral harmony, in a community that holds hands, in a weekly, monthly and seasonal ritual, is the very opposite of loneliness, the very opposite of dissonance. It creates harmony and order. It produces wonder. It re-enchants the world.

I found, at long last, an old Celtic Druid (yet Catholic!) truth echoed in that wonderful poem by W. B. Yeats, "The Two Trees"

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. The holy tree is growing there.

In order to complete my mom's efforts to complete her own family tree, I joined WikiTree and began entering family data onto its huge database.

And suddenly, one day, the light dawned. Here at last was a chance to go on a Grail Quest! The Grail Quest I had not completed in my youth.

Was I related to any of the Grail families mentioned in the movie Da Vinci Code?

Could superfast supercomputers with monster databases be put to some good, an almost magical use, one that would unite humanity and not divide it? Is it possible, by doing straight genealogy and data entry, I might confirm some of the old legends of the Holy Grail and the Grail Familiy?

More intriguing still . . . If I built the family tree for my old sweetheart, M, was it possible that I might find a strange overlap in our families?

Had that strange emotional experience of feeling a strong emotional bond, magnetic tug -- some powerful, dreamlike and emotionally inexplicable attraction to her been based on a much deeper reality?

Did we have a secret bond buried somewhere in the distant past of our family trees?

After many months of work, I discovered answers that completely stunned me.

We were indeed profoundly linked to one another, not by one but by three major Grail families: The Capetians, the Stuarts and the Sinclairs. These Gaelic French and Scottish branches of our family trees were deeply interwoven in a complex, Celtic knot stretching far back into the mists of time.

The "DNA Hall of Records" that I had imagined uniting us? It was not imaginary at all. It was very real. M and I share huge amounts of ancestral memory.

Short of finding the Holy Grail itself, I can tell you, these discoveries went a very long way toward healing my broken heart.

In fact, the discovery that we were cousins and part of the very same Grail family overjoyed me. It brought tears to my eyes. Tears of joy.

How to Avoid A Broken Nose

But enough about me!

Let's talk some more about WikiTree: What can it do for you?

Imagine you have reached old age (in my case not hard to imagine). Imagine you are as profoundly confused as Bill Murray by why so many things went wrong in your life, and you have received a mysterious letter from an ex-girlfriend telling you that you have a son.

Could you save yourself a lot of airfare and a great deal of driving and embarrassment (getting punched in the face by an ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend) by using genealogy?

Yes you could! In the year 2005, the year that the movie Broken Flowers was made, you still had to jet all over the country and get a broken nose to resolve the romantic puzzles and heartbreaks that troubled your old age.

Twenty years on, the question of Bill Murray's paternity, at least, could be resolved with a simple DNA swab kit and a post on WikiTree or FamilyTree. If you have a son who wants to find you, he can match on your Y-DNA, go to your WikiTree profile, see your family tree, and decide if he wants to contact you.

Done. No broken nose.

Denoument: The Sword Inverted

As for all the confusions that trouble the heart of an "over-the-hill Don Juan," I personally can testify that WikiTree and genealogy research unknotted many mysteries and cured most of my heart-aches.

First, I researched the family history of the sculptor, the man who bumped me aside, the guy that M. eventually married. Turns out he is from a family of Minnesotan Croatians strongly associated with Ante Pavelić (1869 - 1938) -- a supporter of Adolf Hitler during World War II, Pavelić served as Prime Minister of Croatia under Croatia's King Tomislav II, the Duke of Spoleto, and he ordered the execution of many Serbs and Jews.

I was greatly relieved to learn that M. divorced from this family and moved on to a brilliant career in publishing in New York. Good on her!

As for the reasons why the Croatian community in Minnesota and my own family (Ukrainian Jews) may have actively interfered with a match between me and M., you only have to look at my Dad's tree. Fierce anti-fascists and Polish "freedom fighters" who would gladly plant a dagger in the heart of anyone wearing a Swastika!

Many members of my Dad's family died in the Holocaust. Many of the members of my mom's family, German-speaking Ukrainians who were suspected of working for Germany, were loaded into train cars and shipped eastward to Siberia. They died in labor camps.

Put simply when I proposed to M. back in 1988, what I was sending her an engraved invitation to join a family that's a bloody mess -- an invitation that she rightly declined. I was also proposing a marriage between families from two feuding religions, Lutherans and Catholics, who have tussled for centuries. Jewish communities fear Lutherans because Martin Luther once advocated burning down Jewish synagogues.

We were star-crossed. Though I am madly fond of M to this day, and wish her the very, very best in life, the match between our families was always awkward at best.

All that interference we encountered, and the loud squelching sound?

That's what happens when you try to join two families that operate on completely different political and religious wavelengths. You get disharmony and some profound emotional squelch and disturbance.

M made a reasonable decision when she decided to break things off, and so did her loving mom and dad. Happiness was not in the cards for us. I see that now.

It wasn't going to work. I finally finally finally managed to see this clearly and unknot the vexing question of "why? why? why?" when I did our family histories on WikiTree.

WikiTree clarifies. It puts your present circumstance into big-picture perspective. It made my situation crystal clear. We came from different family backgrounds -- our religions have been feuding like the Montagues and the Capulets for hundreds of years.

So, if you yourself have been through a rough ride in life, and feel deeply hurt and puzzled by some family history mystery that has always hurt your heart, WikiTree may help you. It can help you put all of your personal misfortunes into historical perspective.

WikiTree highlights patterns. When you look at the histories of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, you may be surprised to find some recurrent themes running through the fate of your own families. You are not alone -- and may not be the first star-crossed lover in your family tree.

It feels good to realize you are not alone.

WikiTree will amaze you. It's full of surprises. Guess what? I am a descendant of St. Olaf. I am a graduate of Carleton College, the cross-town rival of St. Olaf College in Northfield. But, after carefully building my family tree on WikiTree, it turns out that both of my parents are descendants of St. Olaf. I am a 30th-great grandson of St. Olaf Haraldsson (995 - 1030). D'oh! If I had been able to tell this to M and her Lutheran family, they might not have been so quick to tag me as a Catholic and discard me.

WikiTree will amuse you. It's fun. If you like writing biographies, like fixing old family photos, like writing funny anecdotes and like history mysteries, this is the perfect place for you.

WikiTree will heal you. Hugging the old WikiTree helps you heal your self-esteem, because it relates you to kings, queens and celebrities worldwide. It cures loneliness, by reminding you constantly that you are not alone! You have lots and LOTS of good family supporting you. It reunites you, potentially, with hundreds of long-lost cousins.

WikiTree will reconcile you. My lost love from college days, M? Turns out her grandmother is a descendant of the Smith and DeHaven families -- just like my grandmother. We are cousins! In fact, according to WikiTree, we are cousins many times over. Yes our families have been feuding for generations. But at one time they were intermarried -- which explains why they are flinging crockery at each other with so much gusto.

WikiTree brings you lots of cousins. I can now happily love and adore M, not as my wife, but as a distant cousin, a dear cousin of whom I am especially fond (when she isn't throwing teapots at me). WikiTree has put us back into right relationship to one another. I am happy to be in a real and very realistic relationship with her -- one that does not necessarily require us to live under the same roof. I need not fear being rejected by her: we will always be cousins.

WikiTree affirms your underlying unity. She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. M's DNA is literally in my blood like holy wine -- we are united exactly as I had always hoped we would be. Our families may have been conjoined by holy matrimony centuries ago, but we are still united. Mischief managed! She's my beloved cousin M and she always will be. I have God's permission to love her forever, and I carry a little of her in my heart wherever I go.

The Hands of Time

Finally, WikiTree will magnify your spirit.

Your life may be small, but it was definitely designed with a purpose NOT a mistake - it's a single thread in a much, much, much larger tapestry -- a beautiful design being woven by the Fates.

The hand of Fate is sometimes cruel, but it does not make errors. It does savagely beautiful work.

Look at WikiTree! You will begin to understand this: Your life may be hell at present, and you may be nowhere near where you wanted to be in life. You may no longer have the people you wanted to have in your life. Your life may not have ended as you wanted it to end.

But we as individuals cannot boss around the Fates. All we can do is trust that we are now exactly where we were meant to be and where we need to be, then try to make the very best of our situation.

Be an optimist, and it will all turn out exactly as it was meant to end.

Life is often extremely confusing and hurtful, but it is never without purpose.

Knowing this, helps you relax, helps you lighten up. You begin to trust the hands of Fate, even if you don't always understand their strange work, what they are doing to you or why they are doing it.

Learning to trust the skilled hands of Fate might even teach you to forgive other people with a full and grateful heart. "Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do."

M certainly had no idea what she was getting into when she decided to go out with me, right?

My girlfriend dumped me, and I was very angry with her and miserable for many years. But in retrospect: She did exactly the right thing. Did she really have a choice?

A Grail maiden of excellence, she did exactly as bidden by God, regardless of all the pain to herself, regardless of all the tears it cost her. I admire her for that.

Just look at the Big Picture results: Our lives have turned out so beautifully. Exactly as they were meant to be. She has her glamorous career in publishing in New York, the life she always wanted, and I have my less glamorous but equally satisfactory life in Kansas City, pursuing a quiet and bookish life as a Grail Quester who gets to write small but colorful biographies and profile interesting people for WikiTree.

We're exactly where we want to be.

When the details of life vex you, take a step back and look at the Big Picture. Look at WikiTree. Regard the great tapestry of history, in all its infinite variety.

There are no mistakes! It's exactly as if some large, planetary intelligence, far beyond all human understanding and control, were working steadily at weaving a tapestry, with infinite attention to every detail.

Why that planetary intelligence is using LSD is still a deep mystery to me.

But, I feel confident that if you give life the time and space it needs to do its work, the results will always be stunning: A work of infinite beauty and excellence.

Knowing this undoes that knot in your heart. You may have lost a loved one. Tragically, your paths may never, ever cross again. Yet, still, can you not see the beauty in it?

Keep your chin up, kid. Stay in the picture. Trust in the hands of Time.

Et sois bien sage, d'accord?

Why I Love WikiTree

WikiTree has given me something priceless that many people in society strongly desire: An interesting pedigree, full of princes and paupers, knights and knaves, inventors and dissenters, poets and pirates, runaway slaves, mayors and mobsters, butchers and bakers, several successful candystick makers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, saints and sinners and girls whose dark eyes could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

Have I mentioned Tsars and kings? The royalty thing?

All of my weird relationships to royalty shown on this here home page are fairly solid: Not made up by me! I found them easily with WikiTree.

WikiTree is a community effort to build a family tree for the entire world, the entire human race. It demonstrates that we all share a common human bond: The trunk of The World Tree.

A surprising result of this effort: I no longer self-identify as "white" or "American." I simply call myself human. Best to be humble.

WikiTree will make you humble.

After all, if God is "a line of infinite length whose center is everywhere," then the person sitting opposite me on the train really could be the center of the universe, which is exactly where one would expect to find God sitting, cleverly disguised.

It certainly pays not to use color-coding, stereotypes, and ugly racial epithets when addressing God, right? It's better for one's own health.

WikiTree confirms this: The notion that human races and nations are somehow completely separate from each other is simply false. It's an illusion.

To paraphrase a quote once found scrawled on the wall of the underground tunnels that criss-cross the Carleton campus: "Life is just biology, biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, physics is just mathematics, mathematics is just philosophy, and philosophy is bullshit."

What we are staring at, when we regard our family tree, is the ancient philosophical problem of The One and the Many. The puzzle is, how can so many millions of unique and extremely different people ever be united? What common ground unites them?

The answer is: D'oh! The Earth, obviously. Nature. Reality. The environment. Our shared "common ground" is the Real World. The dog that bites, the bee that stings, and all those damned mosquitos that Henry David Thoreau never mentioned when he was busy BS-ing about Walden Pond and how beautiful it is to live in a log cabin without indoor plumbing.

Reality is real and solid and the very opposite of BS. The real world is the way things truly are. The real world is the common ground we all share upon which all BS "theories of everything" are built, right?

That's what unites all people on Earth into a single family: Our common interest in the Earth and its environment.

But the problem is: We can't get our minds around the whole planet, so we try to get our minds around itty-bitty chunks of it (states and nations, populated by separate races with different languages), which requires theorizing that all these people are somehow held together by some kind of magical invisible duct tape ("brotherhood" or "sisterhood" or the family discount deal on Netflix) but we can't seem to find enough duct tape at Wal-Mart to stop world wars from breaking out, and so our theory that the whole human race can somehow be taped together into one big happy family falls apart and starts to look a lot like, well, yeah, BS.

Yet philosophers insist: The illusion of separation is simply an illusion. Everyone who has read the Bhagavad Gita knows this. Ditto the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim religion.

"Hear, oh Israel, the Lord thy God is One!"

One single life force moves us all.

We're talking about wave theory, baby. The 8 billion leaves on a tree may seem to be separate, but when the wind starts blowing, they wave, and wave and wave. Altogether. In unison. Because a single, invisible, overpowering spirit moves them, and all 8 billion leaves are united by a single tree trunk.

From many ancestors and many roots, one world tree grows, and it fathers forth every day into many leaves of many shapes, sizes and different colors.

The ancient Greek philosophers understood this fathering forth of the World Tree to be exactly like the universal geometry of a single point (a seed) fathering forth within the matrix into many two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes: a line, a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, etc.

Polygons? Honey, Polly is not just gone, she's going to town!

The invisible rules that govern this geometry are universal: The same rules of mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry and biology apply on Mars, Venus, Jupiter or any planet you might choose to visit in the universe.

Yet the magic of geometry creates unique shapes that are very peculiar to this Earth, this century, this decade, this year, and this particular point in time. Geometry creates an almost infinite variety of forms that are peculiar and unique.

This cosmos is split into a giga-billion-trillion-ga-zillion peculiar particles of individuality, yet when moved by a strong wind (a wave propagating in space) they move in harmony and unison: As if invisibly guided and united by a central conductor's invisible hand, a united chorus sings from the same sheet music with a single spirit and a single voice.

E pluribus, unum. From the many, one.

The many and diverse varieties of people in our united states and united kingdoms are entirely separate and peculiar unto themselves, yet they are shaped and informed by universal rules of geometry and physics and a moving breath of invisible spirit that magically unites them as a whole.

It is not militant uniformity that unites us. We do not need fascists to bind us together like a bundle of identical sticks. We are secretly united by the moving breath of an invisible, godlike spirit that unites us all, as if with one body, into a unified whole.

Watch an entire baseball stadium full of people doing "the wave," and you get the idea. We are completely separate, but when the spirit moves us, we are completely capable of working in perfect unison.

Our unity arises naturally from the field of nature itself, like the wind blowing through a Big Tree. The amazing diversity of the World Tree gives an illusion of separation. Yet we share a common field, a common trunk, a common set of branches, and an invisible set of physical and geometrical rules that govern all of us.

Therefore, when it comes to family history, I've begun to embrace exactly the definition of Homo sapiens that my biology teacher taught to me in high school: Homo sapiens is a single race called the human race, and there are no sub-species within the human race.

The appearance of being separate from other people, both past and present, is simply an illusion

WikiTree proves this: We're all connected to each other in one big happy and wavy family tree.

Put another way: Every flavor of ice cream in a shop full of 31 flavors shares one thing in common: It's all ice cream.

There may be strong arguments over which is the "best" or yummiest flavor in the world, but at the end of the day: It's all ice cream, dude! Why are you whining? Be happy that you are in an ice cream shop with so many flavors!

Recombinant DNA and the fabric of human flesh are so complexly interwoven that there is really no point in trying to sub-sort people into three black-tan-white skin buckets. seven ROYGBIV buckets, one dozen nation buckets or hundreds of language buckets.

Every human is unique. Every person is a unicorn. We are living on a planet populated by more than 8 billion unicorns, and unicorns would seem to be a dime a dozen. But when you look at them closely, the notion that all unicorns are alike vanishes.

Examine the unicorns in the tapestry carefully, and you will realize with a shock that, even within the set of all 8 billion unicorns, each unicorn is different from all the others. Each unicorn is unique.

Do you realize what that means? To be a unique unicorn? Do you have any idea what that means?

Wait for it . . .

We're all virgins.

Seriously. WikiTree taught me this: There will never be another you.

You can replicate, and replicate, and replicate, and even try to clone your DNA, but in this strange tapestry that is the Space-Time continuum, there will never be another you.

Anyone who tries to replicate you is going to bungle the job: Guaranteed.

Junior isn't senior. Your "mini me" is slightly off. Your child is only half you and kinda like you, You can never really copy yourself perfectly, because even a perfect clone is going to be brought up differently, by different people, at a different location in Space-Time, and the results are going to be -- urrr, kinda different.

You are a unique, non-reproducible masterpiece. Which makes you EXTREMELY valuable and priceless. You are one of a kind. One out of 8 billion. Extremely rare.

Are you human? Then you're a unique member of my human family, and I deeply respect you. But keep your hands off my f-ing unicorn!

Some things are sacred, and holy, untouchable and deserving of complete and nearly infinite respect. The World Tree is one of them, and the magical apple or fruit that grows from that World Tree is another.

So Rule No. 1: Keep your hand off my unicorn, my masterpiece the sacred mystery that is me. And the second rule is like unto the first: keep your hands off my virgin daughter, the apple of my eye, my one and only offspring.

This is the basic paradox at the heart of all attempts at human replication, and reproduction: In so far as we are interested in SELF-replication and SELF-reproduction, we would almost prefer our offspring to be like Pallas Athena, the virgin daughter who lept, fully formed, from the mind of Zeus.

People with very strong egos want a perfect mini-me and an exact replica: Narcissists want no other person involved at all in the process of self-replication. They would almost wish for some form of self-mapping or Parthenogenesis (virgin birth) to take place, not to go 50-50 with a person of the opposite gender, or a different race, who requires them to mix or "adulterate" their bloodline with lots of foreign or strange DNA.

The original parents (the father especially) tend to be control freaks, because what narcissists want is a perfect "mini me" and when they find some species of surfer banging away on their teenage daughter they get mighty angry.

Put another way: Think of my virgin daughter as a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that belongs to Mick Jagger.

Your eyes get big. and she's exactly what you've always secretly wanted -- which is exactly why you can't have her! You know you are going to get your hand slapped if you even touch the hood ornament.. You can almost hear Mick yelling, "Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!"

So whoever came up with that image of young Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Paradise, drooling over an apple while a huffy puffy Big Daddy stands in the background looking mighty angry got it right. We have many WikiTree profile managers guarding their work far more jealously than Mick Jagger ever guarded his Silver Cloud.

Who wouldn't get upset to discover the fruit of one's hard labor being pawed thoughtlessly by ignorant children with sticky fingers? God, Mick and I share one goal, and we have but one humble request: Please don't smudge the mirror of our family history with sticky fingers.

Do not touch. And if you must touch, then please wash your hands carefully beforehand, and do your family edits to the world tree lightly, lightly and with beauty. Take great care.

Think of Wikitree as a mirror held up to the face of the whole human race: a beautifully woven tapestry of unicorns.

It took enormous amounts of effort to make this masterpiece. If you look at that tapestry and all you see is the color of an individual figure's skin, then you have entirely missed the extremely clever and amazing "intersectionality" of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of strands of culture that went into that one person's creation.

It is this amazingly detailed intersectionality that makes our planet-sized tapestry of humanity a wonderful and extremely clever work of art. The number of strands of DNA that go into weaving a single human being is mind-boggling. Utterly amazing.

This is why, I think, everyone loves the Saturday Night Live video on YouTube of The Rev. Jesse Jackson reading the poem "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss. Nobody likes to be crudely color coded or treated like a cartoon.

We prefer 3D, please, thank you very much. 4D or even 5D, if you think you can manage it.

Nor does anyone really like to hear the highly-complex, harmonic convergence of the many cultures, languages and traditions that went into making our family name reduced to a single color or a racial slur.

Seriously? That's all you see or hear when you look at me and hear my name? You don't hear an entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir of ancestors singing like angels in the background?

WikiTree is the perfect antidote to ignorant people who try to poison your thoughts by using only black-and-white color buckets, or people who treat you like a stereotyped cartoon. If you are feeling hurt or angry or down, because you have been verbally abused by a racist, you can always go back to WikiTree and stare at this gigantic Wall of Worth that is your family tree.

You can see the amazing tapestry of human diversity on full display, and watch it grow while more than 1 million WikiTree members busily work on honoring that diversity.

Sigh. It makes me so happy. To my utter amazement: WikiTree has restored my faith in human beings.

Another surprising result of WikiTree's community effort: If you want to relate yourself to princes, as well as paupers, then you may do so. The links are all there.

Because the World Tree is one big, unified tree, that means you are not only related to the lower castes of society but also, without any doubt, directly related to the higher castes of human society.

I personally remember the time I first saw an English king pop up in my family tree. It's like watching a mouse stand up in your soup. I was shocked and not entirely certain that I was happy to see him there.

I am still not certain I'm happy to have any royalty in my family tree at all: They are embarrassing. When you read their history, you'd almost rather have Billy The Kid or Wild Bill Hickock up there in the attic, bumping around.

But it certainly puts into perspective very quickly what we mean by aristocracy: Are they really the best? In many ways you are much luckier to be related to your Auntie Griselda, who is famous within the family for her fantastic molasses cookies.

For what it's worth: WikiTree will quickly make it possible for you to demonstrate that you have royal, aristocratic and noble ancestors in your family tree -- just like everyone else.

The kings and queens shown here are permanent fixtures in the trunk of the World Tree - the worldwide pedigree of the human race. All that differs in my own particular family tree is my peculiar and unique path of descent from ancient ancestors shared by millions of other people.

Indeed, we are ALL descendants of royalty, and the reason for this is almost purely mathematical.

Everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. The number of your ancestors rapidly increases as you go back in time. In fact there are about four generations per century and the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation back.

Do the math. The formula is the number 2 to the power n, where n = the number of generations back. The number of your ancestors grows exponentially as you travel back in time. But the population of the Earth rapidly shrinks.

If you go back 20 generations, or about 500 years, to the year 1500 A.D., you will have 1 million ancestors. Go back 30 generations, another 250 years, to the year 1250, and you will have 1 billion ancestors.

Yet the total human population of planet Earth in the year 1250 A.D. has been estimated at 500 million. The number of ancestors you MUST have, 1 billion, is twice the actual population of the Earth.

By the time you have gone back 1000 years (about 40 generations), how many ancestors will you have? The formula says 2 to the 40th power, and if you try to calculate that number . . . your calculator will melt.

The number is huge. It far exceeds the entire population of the Earth in the year 1000. But these are ancestors you MUST have.

In other words, the mathematical probability that you are related to any one person who lived on or before the year 1250 is good, and the chance you are related to a person who lived before 1000 A.D. is astronomically great.

The category of "people who lived prior to the year 1000" definitely includes kings, queens, saints, villains and some very colorful characters indeed.

Genealogy is simply the gentle art of tracing your exact path back to those fascinating people. It's a hobby everyone can enjoy, because EVERYONE has an amazing family tree.

WikiTree proves it.

How to View Family Connections

Within WikiTree, one may explore family connections to this or any other profile by following these simple steps:

1. From within the profile page, click on the Ancestors button to view the person's pedigree, then click on any link that interests you
2. If you are a WikiTree member, sign in and you may explore your own family connections further by going to the "My WikiTree" tab and using the drop-down menu to select "Connections," or by using the Family Tree & Tools tab.
3. Those who are not WikiTree members may still use all the main tools, namely:

• The Ancestor Explorer app,
• The Fan Chart app, or
• The Relationship Finder app.

Explore some really cool WikiTree Apps

Anyone and their dog can use the long list of amazing WikiTree applications built by independent developers. See the list at the "Help:Apps" page here.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Apps

Want to carry the entire toolkit with you on your cell phone or laptop? Simply click the hyperlink above and save the "Help:Apps" page link to your Favorites. When you want to use the tool kit, just go to your Favorites, pull up the "Help:Apps" page and click on the button for the specific WikiTree app you want to use. The button will take you directly to the app.

Within these apps, I most often use the Relationship Finder tool and the Ancestor Explorer tool. Again, these powerful tools are completely available to the public, and you don't even need to be a member of WikiTree to use them. You don't have to be signed in. All you need are the WikiTree IDs of the people you are comparing and exploring.

Within Relationship Finder, one may use the person's WikiTree ID (in my case Shernick-1) to find family links or connections to the WikiTree ID of any other person on WikiTree.

How to Find A WikiTree ID

How do you find someone's WikiTree ID? Simple: Use the WikiTree Family Tree Search engine.

Example: You want to see if writer Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) is related to the great English poet, John Donne. First you load Dominick Dunne's name into the Family Tree Search engine and hit the green SEARCH button to search. You can easily find him among the search results. Just click on his hyperlinked name and his WikiTree profile pops up.

When his WikiTree page pops up, look up at the top of the page for its web address. You should see: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Dunne-565

The Dunne-565 part is his WikiTree ID.

If you aren't logged into WikiTree, how do you find Dominick Dunne's WikiTree ID? Simple. Just use Google. Google "Dominick Dunne" + WikiTree. After pulling up his WikiTree page, look up at the hyperlinked address for his profile page. Once again, it's https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Dunne-565, and the Dunne-565 part is his WikiTree ID.

Be sure to write it down: Dunne-565. It's the key to all his WikiTree tools.

How do you find the famous poet John Donne's WikiTree ID?

Well, so many people have been named John Dunne or John Donne over the past 2000 years, that you had best go to Wikipedia first, to grab the famous poet's birth and death dates. Simple reference to Wikipedia tells you that you want the John Donne who lived from 1572 to 1631.

Google "John Donne 1631 WikiTree" and Google itself will pull up his WikiTree profile link. Click on the link, confirm you've got the WikiTree profile page for the right person and look at the hyperlink address field at the top of the page. It's https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Donne-48, so the famous poet John Donne's WikiTree ID must be Donne-48.

Be sure to write it down: Donne-48.

Now you are set to use WikiTree's extremely powerful data base to explore their family trees. You can use the Ancestor Explorer app to delve deeply into the ancestors of either man (all you need is one WikiTree ID to use the Ancestor Explorer).

Or you can use the Relationship Finder app to explore all of the deeply hidden family relations that connect these two very different people (the Relationship Finder requires two WikiTree IDs).

Are they connected by marriage or related by a common ancestor? Now that you have both WikiTree IDs you can find out very easily!

If you forgot to save the Relationship Finder tool to your Favorites, there is an easy way to fish it up. Go way way way down to the bottom of any person's WikiTree profile page and click on the dark green "More Genealogy Tools Button." This pulls up the person's pedigree, and way down beneath the pedigree illustration you will find a long list of WikiTree "Genealogy Research" tools.

Go to tool number four, the CONNECTIONS tool.

To find a relationship by blood (a list of all commonly shared ancestors) click on the Relationship Finder hyperlink.

Load the two WikiTree IDs, Dunne-525 and Donne-48, into the Relationship Finder Search Engine and hit the FIND RELATIONSHIP button.

Result: No relationship found. No common ancestor found on WikiTree. BUT note that you are now automatically offered a hyperlink that allows you to explore Connections by marriage.

Click the Connections link. Result: "Dominick Dunne is 19 Degrees from John Donne." By 19 degrees, we mean 19 steps, or 19 people, away from each other, following a zig-zag path through the World Tree.

At the bottom of the illustration, click on the Alternate View: Generational Path button for a very clear graphic representation of their zig-zag relationship. The results can be amazing!

Are Your Parents Related to Each Other?

Because WikiTree's superfast search engine can take any two people and tell you in a split second if they are related and how they are related, an obvious question arises: Are your own two parents related? The answer can be surprising.

In my case, I discovered that my father and mother do indeed share 112 common ancestors. That is, their family trees overlap in 112 places over a period of 30 generations, according to WikiTree's Relationship Finder Tool. Technically speaking, when one looks at their closest relationship, they are ninth cousins once removed.

By "ninth" cousin we mean that you start with their parents and have to go nine generations back before you find their first common ancestor. If they were first cousins (still legal in parts of Alabama and the Darwin family!) you start with their parents and only have to go one generation back.

In other words, if you load Charles Darwin (WikiTree ID Darwin-15) and his wife Emma Wedgwood (WikiTree ID Wedgwood-33) into the Relationship Finder you discover, um . . . .

Moving right along, what do we mean by ninth cousins "once removed"? We mean that, in order to find the most recent common ancestor shared between these two people, you have to go back nine generations from the first person's parents and then 9 generations back from the second person's grand parents.

In other words, the triangle leading back to the shared ancestor is a bit lop-sided, or one generation "off" -- one side of the triangle is 9 generations and the other side is 9 + 1 generations or "once removed."

See the nifty and colorful "Cousins Chart" from FamilySearch.org for a better visual demonstration.

When you think about it, exploring the ancestors shared by your parents is not only scary, it's fascinating. Sometimes mind boggling.

Example? Using the Relationship Finder tool on the WikiTree IDs for my parents I discovered that my father and mother share a famous mutual ancestor: They both descend from Sir Thomas Grey (1455 - 1501), a Knight of the Garter and Knight of Bath. Sir Thomas was the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville (1437 - 1492) by her first husband, Sir John Grey (1432 - 1461), the 7th Lord Ferrers. who died at the second Battle of St. Albans.

Elizabeth Woodville married secondly to King Edward IV of England, on 1 May 1464, and she thus became the Queen of England. In other words, my parents both descend from the famous "White Queen," who played a central role in the War of the Roses. She belonged to the House of York, which was represented by the White Rose, as opposed to the House of Lancaster, which was represented by a Red Rose.

For an illustrated summary of the Wars of the Roses see HW Issue 23 at Archive.org.

Elizabeth Woodville's Wikipedia article indicates that she has been portrayed in several popular books and films. Notably, she was portrayed recently by actress Rebecca Ferguson in the BBC Television series The White Queen (2013), which was based on Philippa Gregory's historical novels. and by Essie Davis in The White Princess (2017), an eight-episode sequel that appeared on the Starz movie channel.

As Queen consort, Elizabeth Woodville gave King Edward IV several children, including Edward V of England (b. 1470) and his brother, Richard, Duke of York (b. 1473), better known as the two Princes in the Tower.

My parents, in other words, are both descendants from an elder step-brother to the two young Princes who were deposed (murdered) ca. 1483 by King Richard III. Had Sir Thomas Grey been murdered as well, my paternal and maternal families would not exist.

The bloody history of King Richard III may be found in All About History Issue 122 here.

National Public Radio recently retold the story of how King Richard III's bones were re-discovered in 2013, beneath a busy English car park (a parking lot) in the city of Leicester. The identity of his remains were confirmed with ancestral DNA.

Explore Further: The More Genealogy Tools Menu

1. Click the ANCESTOR EXPLORER Link > Enter the WikiTree ID (in my case, Shernick-1) > Set the Number of Generations Back to 20 > Select the List Type (For example, choose "American Revolution" to list all my ancestors tagged as participating in the American Revolution) > Click on the GENERATE LIST button > Wait patiently for about three minutes (I have about 22 ancestors in this category, and it takes time to load) > View the listed results and click on their hyperlinks to explore individual profiles, or > Click the "Map Links" button, which shows each ancestor as an icon on a Google map, or > Download the entire list as a PDF for later use (the PDF preserves the hyperlinks).
2. Cursor down, down, down the list of Genealogy Tool options to the FAN CHART app. This button allow you to generate a very neat and downloadable image of any family tree on WikiTree, so long as you know the WikiTree ID. Then,
3. Continue scrolling downward until you get to the Relationship Finder hyperlink, and (looking within that block of text) click on the hyperlink that says RELATIONSHIP FINDER QUICK LINKS. This will take you to a fun page that allows you to quickly and automatically check any WikiTree ID (in my case Shernick-1) against dozens of famous people and heads of state, including Presidents and Prime Ministers.
4. For an overview of my own family's connections to famous cousins and royalty, I've done most of the searching for you. Simply read the overview below.

Find Your Famous Ancestors and Cousins

Want to find your own relationship to famous people? After you have logged into WikiTree and created a family tree, WikiTree makes finding connections to notorious people a cinch with the Featured Connections page here. In the upper right hand corner you will see a "My Connections" button, and all you have to do is click to load the entire list. It will automatically run the entire list of Featured people against your own WikiTree ID, and generate a list of your famous ancestors and cousins in less than a minute.

Alternatively, you can click on any of the subcategory headings on the Featured Connections Subcategories page, and once the subcategory page loads you will also find a "My Connections" button on the upper right-hand corner of each new sub-category page.

For example, if you click on the hyperlink to NASA Astronauts, it takes you to the NASA Astronauts subcategory page here. By clicking on the "My Connections" button, you get two lists.

The first list is a list of your NASA Astronaut cousins (Astronauts related to you by blood or consanguinity). The second list is a list of NASA Astronauts "connected" to you by marriage or "degrees of separation" (not necessarily related to you by direct descent or DNA). Both lists are fun to explore!

For example, one of my distant cousins, connected by marriage only, is the singer Joan Baez. She is connected in a very lateral and sideways manner to the famous Astor family (extremely wealthy New Yorkers), and to my great surprise the Astor family trace their lineage vertically (through several generations) to my mother's Armstrong relatives. Jaw dropping! And I might never have discovered my relationship to the famous Astor family had I not been exploring a strange and lateral "Connection" to Joan Baez.

The Connection Finder search engine opens up many, many strange and hidden connections you might never have dreamt up in a hundred years.

By going to the Connection Finder tool and then clicking on the Featured Connections tab, one may easily generate and discover a long, long list of hyperlinked connections to any WikiTree ID. Exploring that long list can take weeks and months.

Here, for example, is a long list of some of the famous ancestors and people who are supposedly my distant, distant cousins by "consanguinity" (via common ancestors shared from 15 to 48 generations ago). You can see immediately that these are very distant relatives, yet it contains some surprising and fun connections worth exploring:

• 16 generations John Hancock III (1737-1793)
• 17 generations George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876)
• 17 generations Pete Rose Sr
• 18 generations Peter V. Seeger (1919-2014)
• 19 generations Hōhepine (Te Wake) Cooper (1895-1994)
• 19 generations Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) [aka Mark Twain]
• 19 generations Michael Douglas
• 21 generations Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (1895-1966)
• 21 generations George Brinton McClellan (1826-1885)
• 21 generations Lucille Desiree Ball (1911-1989)
• 22 generations Amelia Mary Earhart (1897-abt.1937)
• 22 generations John Lithgow
• 23 generations Edward Plantagenet (abt.1239-1307) [King Edward I]
• 23 generations Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) [aka Lewis Carroll]
• 24 generations Gillian Anderson [aka "Agent Scully" from the X-Files]
• 24 generations Mickey Charles Mantle (1931-1995)
• 26 generations Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
• 26 generations William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
• 27 generations Richard (Plantagenet) of England (1157-1199)
• 27 generations Louis Dieudonné (Bourbon) de France (1638-1715)
• 27 generations Maria Antonia (Habsburg-Lothringen) d'Autriche (1755-1793) aka Marie Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XIV
• 27 generations Francis Lightfoot Lee (1734-1797)
• 28 generations William Lamb (1779-1848)
• 29 generations Ambrose Powell Hill Jr. (1825-1865)
• 30 generations Ludwig Otto Friedrich W. (Wittelsbach) von Bayern (1845-1886)
• 31 generations Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief (1925-2013)
• 32 generations William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)
• 32 generations Norvell Hardy (1892-1957)
• 32 generations Charles Grey KG (1764-1845)
• 32 generations Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels-Greifenstein-Hungen (1651-1724)
• 34 generations Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-1909)
• 34 generations Dolly Parton
• 38 generations Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967)

Celebrity Genealogy: Boosting into the Stratosphere with FamousKin.com

Have you discovered FamousKin.com yet?

If not, I would STRONGLY urge you to avoid this website until you have two hours free to spend, because this relational data base is fun, super-fast, super-slick, and highly addictive!

Built by Rick Hall, a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, FamousKin.com is "a free genealogical website devoted to discovering family connections of famous people to each other."

The concept is elegant and powerful: Create a menu with two dozen tabs, each tab being a group of famous people to whom you might wish you were related; then populate each of these categories with a hundred celebrity profiles, in alphabetical order by surname, giving each celebrity their own thumbnail photo.

The amazing part: Rick has already built a complete family tree for each celebrity, and each pedigree is very professionally done.

This man is a genealogy rock star.

By each thumbnail, Rick parks only two buttons: "Famous Kin" and "Family Tree." The first gives a long line of famous relatives (the list is only thumbnail photos). The second button instantly provides a pedigree, and a professionally cited sources page for that pedigree.

For example, if you go to the TV/ Film/Stage menu, choose the actress Lucille Ball and click the "FamousKin" button, BOOM. There's a long and fascinating row of celebrity mug shots of Lucy's famous kin. They are lined up in a neat row like face cards.

But what is their relationship to Lucy?

Click on any one of those faces, and the database shows that person's exact connection to Lucille Ball.

Example: One of Lucy's Famous Kin is King Edward I. Click on Fast Eddy's face-button, and up pops a chart informing you that Lucille Ball is a 21st-great granddaughter to King Edward and showing the exact line of descent, from King Edward I down to Lucille Ball.

https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-chart.php?name=4017+lucille+ball&kin=3697+edward+i

You can download this descendancy chart by simply clicking the PDF button on the right side. For any one of the relatives standing between Edward and Lucy, if you click on their name the hyperlink takes you to a simple, no-frills family group page with an official source neatly cited at the foot of the page.

FamousKin is doing exactly what WikiTree does: Using a huge relational data base to quickly discover hidden lines of relationship.

But unlike the profiles on WikiTree, which carry tons of text, the profiles on FamousKin are merely mug shots with a name and description underneath, so Rick's database sorts extremely quickly. It's super fast! Like a professional dealer at a casino expertly sorting and dealing face cards

You don't get a shred of biography on any profile, but the underlying genealogy itself is rock solid, Rick's done all the homework for you, and the sourcing is a real godsend for WikiTreers who want sourcing help fast.

I therefore enthusiastically suggest pairing FamousKin.com with WikiTree.

Using FamousKin.com to Find "Gateway" Ancestors"

I'll give an example of what I mean by pairing Famous kin.com with WikiTree.

Say that I have already traced my family back to Charlemagne. Now, Charlemagne has thousands, and thousands of descendants, and some of those modern-day descendants are celebrities. Am I distantly related to some unknown celebrity cousins via Charlemagne?

Using FamousKin.com's name search engine, I enter "Charlemagne" and guess what I get? Look at the results here:

https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-menu.php?name=4143+charlemagne

Hundreds of very famous people descend from Charlemagne, and FamousKin.com lists those celebrities in a split second. I have just discovered a hundred distant celebrity cousins, including Princess Diana, Prince Harry, Tony Dow and Justin Bieber!

What if I have NO relationship to King Charlemagne? How can Famous kin.com help me? Answer: By pointing me to some "Gateway Ancestors."

The list of Charlemagne's celebrity descendants above is also a long list of viable gateways to Charlemagne's family tree. You may not be able to plug yourself into Charlemagne's family tree via Justin Bieber (who is a very recent offspring), but the long list of Charlie's descendants also includes many celebrities born in the 19th, 18th, 17th, and 16th Centuries.

Do any of those descendants of Charlemagne have surnames that match surnames in you own tree? Then you suddenly know exactly which branch you want to work on hardest! Work hard on that branch, and you may strike on a line that leads straight back to Charlemagne.

As a fast and well-researched database, Famous kin.com is truly a treasure trove of gateway ancestors. It's not just fun, it's an extremely useful tool.

The only problem I had with Rick Hall's website was this: It took me a while to discover that he had parked the main menu as a drop-down menu under the three-bars tool icon in the upper right-hand corner. Once you discover this hidden main menu, the website is much easier to use, because the celebrities are neatly categorized.

The celebrity categories which Rick has fully populated include: Presidents, TV/Film/Stage, Mayflower, Witchcraft, Royalty, Signers, Historical, Great Migration, Jamestown, Magna Carta, Infamous, Literary, Political, Music, Inventors, Spies, Military, Artists, Fashion, Business, First Ladies, Vice Presidents, Governors, Space, Sports and Germanna.

Watch Intrepid Explorers Face the Unknown on the "Finding Your Roots" TV Show

Frustrated because you were an orphan, or adopted, or have zero celebrities in your family tree? No worries! Have I got a toolbox to drop on you in the next section!

But first, if you are in the "frustrated to tears" category, I want to encourage you to watch one of my favorite TV shows: "Finding Your Roots" on PBS.

Now going on its ninth season, "Finding Your Roots" is always enjoyable and it constantly reminds you that even film and TV celebrities may face brick walls when trying to trace their family trees. If you are a frustrated orphan or foster child, you have some very famous people sitting with you in the same boat.

It is a rare person indeed who does not find at least one "Titanic Disaster" that left a gaping hole 🕳️ n their family tree.

In every episode of this show, Henry Louis Gates Jr , a professor at Harvard, helps people summon the courage to face that dark and often scary mystery of their family's unknown history. They explore the knowledge gap by sending in a crack team of genealogy detectives, who always come back with interesting results.

See the Wikipedia List of "Finding Your Roots" episodes here.

Guest celebrities on the show have included Branford Marcellus, Barbara Walters, Samuel Jackson, Condoleeza Rice, Margaret Cho, Stephen King, Aaron Sanchez, Alan Dershowitz, Deepak Chopra, George Stephanopoulos, Jessica Alba, and many many more.

If you are like me you will come away from these fascinating excursions into the past thinking 1. "Well I am glad the skeletons in my family's past were not dug up on national TV, in front of an audience of millions!" and 2. "Wow! With enough brainpower, know-how and lots of travel money, just about any family history mystery can be solved."

Please watch at least three episodes, and you will realize you are definitely not alone when it comes to facing brick walls, and if you are looking for help, there are some amazing genealogy resources out there, and people who really can work miracles.

One of those miracle people is you.

FamilySearch.org and the portal to Narnia at the back of your wardrobe

I'm now going to drop a heavy toolkit on your head.

That is, I am going to point you toward some websites and tools that you simply must use, if you want to explore family history on your own. With this kit, you can find many lost relatives and most of the hidden "Easter Eggs" in your branch of the World Tree all by yourself.

Why? Because we don't all have a Harvard professor and a crack team of genealogy detectives to solve the family puzzles for us, do we?

Also, to hook up with WikiTree's "world tree," we need to do the research on about five generations all by ourselves. It takes about that many generations before you can start plugging your own branch into the big World Tree built by a million other genealogists.

While family history is a wonderful excuse for taking luxury vacations all over the world, let's face it: If you're a war orphan, it's probably best not to go back to the war zone you came from, and most of us don't have the time or budget to just jet off to Kiev every weekend to use their library catalog while missiles explode all around us.

If you have a limited budget, don't despair. You will find, if you rummage around in your closet, that you have everything you need: A toothbrush, a library card, and a talent for typing with your thumbs.

The tooth brush is so you can smile at your local librarian while asking whether they offer Ancestry.com library edition? You may be surprised to learn that Ancestry.com generously grants free access to its otherwise expensive database at public libraries all over the world.

If your library offers free internet terminals and subscribes to Ancestry "library edition" then in a matter of minutes they may have you typing your library card number into the proper launch screen, and you will suddenly enter into a Narnia-like wonderland of almost infinite genealogical records gathered from archives all over the Earth.

I'm not making this up: You don't have to jet out to Kiev and get yourself shot to get your hands on foreign birth, marriage and death records. You may get them all for free at your local library by using Ancestry "Library Edition."

If your library does not offer a free library edition of Ancestry.com, you still have a friend in Family search.org, an absolutely free family history website.

In fact, in many ways the vast treasure trove of world genealogy resources that Family search.org offers is even better than Ancestry.com's collection.

Again, it's absolutely free.

For basic training, see more than 188 free classes on their RootsTech video page here

https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/library?cid=em-rt-15306&mkt_tok=NTkwLUJVSy03MjYAAAGKvKxuwIDvD42o7V-uERQY_VC4jBFl8xE_EUSYfJ4R4f_I6BjDdVo6RLJsmnMi0JK_-efu6qln2trLp9AqycLA9YMuE4b5Dq2aqICF2Pl0

To get a global, worldwide overview of the deep, deep, deep collection of nearly infinite resources offered at FamilySearch.org, see their clickable World Map here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page

From this clickable World Map, you can literally click on any continent, then any country, then any state, county or city you want, and at each level there is a neatly ordered "Wiki" page of free, hyperlinked resources.

This is quite simply THE best family history research guide in the world, and it's all free.

Explore Surnames and DNA online with Linkpendium.com

The World Map of FamilySearch records, linked above, may be fairly useless if you have only a surname and no idea where in the world your ancestor was living. In that case, you may want to use Linkpendium.com at first

Linkpendium.com does one thing, and does it well: It aggregates. It snorfs up genealogy information all over the internet, and neatly presents the results as hyperlinks to the websites found

For example, Go to Google's search engine, type in "Smith Family" + Linkpendium, hit Enter, and you'll get useful results fast.

The first results group will be a general summary titled "Smith Family Trees, Crests, Genealogy, DNA, more" followed by several more Smith family aggregations, each cluster sorted by state.

The DNA links appended are especially helpful. In fact, when you pull up the results for the Smith family, which is an absolutely huge family with a very common name, the very first category of results to pounce is the section titled "DNA Project."

There are two reasons you'll want to jump on DNA links like a duck diving on a June bug.

The first is because these links will usually bring up a Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) website, in this case a link titled "Smith Surname at FamilyTreeDNA."

The second is because these FTDNA websites post PDF spreadsheets, the results of hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of careful Y-DNA testing, and you don't have to pay a dime to view those results: You just need to know where to find the link.

Linkpendium tells you exactly where to find the Family Tree DNA results for any surname under the sun.

Why would you want to pounce a boring spreadsheet? Because that surname spreadsheet, my friend, is all Y-DNA validated.

If the main question you are asking (within the context of "Smiths") is "Which one of you ornery Smith boys is my Daddy?" then what you want is the Y-DNA spread sheet. Because Y-DNA is what scientists use to prove paternity.

Beneath the generic surname Smith lies a very wide rainbow-like spectrum of males named Smith with very different Y-DNA. The Y-DNA spread sheets or ["Smith DNA Projects"] published and put online were put out there for exactly this reason: To help sort out all the Smith boys.

Smith cousins are trying very carefully to untangle and validate their family trees. Using only their FTDNA kit numbers (to preserve their privacy) they can now prove, scientifically, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that great grandpa Barney Smith had such-and-such a haplogroup. If you don't have the very same haplogroup, then you ain't no descendant of Barney Smith!

Conversely: If your last name is Jones and you grew up in a British orphanage, were fostered out to three different families, and your FamilyTree DNA test came back showing a very strong match to American Smiths from Bluefield, West Virginia, well, welcome to WikiTree!

It's an international tree, and this is a great place to start the search for your birth father. See Adoption Angels - Basic Search Help for more on how to find help reuniting with biological family.

How is this going to help you, if you are a female Smith descendant, or a Smith who has not tested his own Y-DNA yet?

Well no one said you have to get tested, sweet stuff! You are welcome to use WikiTree simply as a learning tool. That's where WikiTree and its Surname studies and DNA pages come in.

This is a great website for learning the basics of genetic genealogy and DNA matching.

Dial up the name Smith on WikiTree, and you will find it already has a Smith Name Study group going.

See CATEGORY: SMITH NAME STUDY.

This category has several sub-category groups going, including a Smith DNA study group, who fully utilize WikiTree's DNA pages and DNA matching tools to compare DNA, and make sure they don't add to Barney Smith's tree a "brother" named Snuffy Smith whose Y-DNA does not match.

What this means is, as an anonymous member of the public you are free to look at all the Smith FamilyTreeDNA test results, listen to the Smith study comments posted, and even quietly match your own DNA with the DNA posted on WikiTree.

But you are not required to test, or to share, or to post your own DNA at all. You are definitely welcome to sit in and benefit from the lively discussion on DNA matching, without participating or paying a dime.

That is one of the public benefits of WikiTree.

Out of Africa: All Haplogroups Lead Back to Africa

If you have ever used one of the popular DNA kits offered by 23andMe or FamilyTreeDNA, then you've probably run into the term "haplogroup" before: It's just a fancy word for saying "your DNA relatives" or the group of people who have genetic markers most similar to your own.

See the Wikipedia article "Haplogroup" here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

Notice the colorful world map showing the migration patterns of Y-DNA haplogroups all over the world?

All Y-DNA starts in eastern Africa with "Y-DNA Adam" and his impossi-hot wife "Mitochondrial Eve."

In other words, genetic scientists think the entire human race began in eastern Africa.

The entire human race has African ancestry. There is no such thing as a human without African ancestry.

Explore Your African Heritage

Africa is the Earth's second-largest continent, with a population of 1.4 billion people (2021). It contains more than 54 sovereign countries and territories, with 1200 to 3000 different languages and tribal dialects spoken.

If you want to find the full menu for WikiTree projects in the continent of Africa (including all countries within Africa), then you go to the "Category" level. That is, you go to Google and search on the term "Category:Africa" plus WikiTree. Results:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Africa

This takes you to a menu of 96 sub-categories, all dealing with Africa and its individual countries.

Explore Your African-American Heritage

The best place to start exploring WikiTree's list of famous and notable people is the Featured Connections Page.

For Black Heritage the overview page is

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:US_Black_Heritage_Project.

For notable African Americans, try Category: African-American, Notables at

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:African-American_Notables.

Try also the subcategory 100 Greatest African Americans. Click on the "My Connections" button in the upper right-hand corner.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections.

Next go to the Ancestors Explorer page. Enter your WikiTree ID or someone else's WikiTree ID. For example, President Barack Obama's WikiTree ID is Obama-2. Enter the number of generations back (usually 25). From the List Criteria option choose Biotext. When prompted for the term to search, you may choose any term you desire. For example you may choose the term "slave" if you want to find out if President Obama has any ancestors who were slaves or slave owners.

Select the optional display filters. Hit enter and wait patiently (two or three minutes) for results. For Obama -2, there are more than a dozen results. Based on the texts of Wills contained in their biographies, President Obama had several ancestors who were slaves. He also had ancestors from Virginia who were slave owners.

Subcategory: Asante's 100 Famous African Americans

Take a good look at my profile photo. I am clearly whiter than sour cream, and I used to self-identity as white.

But guess what? If you go to the WikiTree Featured Connection "Asante's List of Top 100 Notable African Americans," and pop my WikiTree ID (Shernick-1) into the search engine, then hit Enter, WikiTree finds dozens and dozens and dozens of ancient ancestors whom I share in common with America's most famous African Americans.

I can claim with pride that I am a distant cousin to:

• Halle Berry
• Harriet Tubman
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Marian Anderson
• Mohammed Ali (aka Cassius Clay)
• The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and
• Langston Hughes.

In other words, one may think of oneself as white, or black, or Asian, or Aboriginal, but those simplistic categories become meaningless on WikiTree.

Show me a person who thinks they are "pure-blooded" or 100% anything, and I will show you someone who probably has not traced their family tree any further back than four generations.

WikiTree may trace you family tree as far back as 40 generations. Going back that far means you are going to find connections that you did not think existed. You were wrong. These connections do exist.

The results are surprising. They underscore what historian Eleanor Zelliot calls the vast interconnectedness of everything to everything.

Explore Your North American Native Heritage

The aboriginal peoples of North and South America and the North American tribes are very definitely under-represented by WikiTree,

A list of Native American Tribes may be found at the Legends of America website here.

A list of Notable Native Americans on the Frontier may be found here.

See also the list of Native American Heroes and Leaders here.

These key ancestors are most easily searched by simply loading their names into Google and adding the term "WikiTree" to see if they have a WikiTree profile. If they don't, please build one!

On WikiTree itself, individual profile pages may be dialed up by following these links:

Native Americans Project

• Apache Team
• Choctaw Team
• Cherokee Team
• Navajo Team - a completely blank page and the saddest page on WikiTree
• Shawnee Team
• Sioux Team

Explore Your Spanish, Mexican and South American Heritage

For 14 Hispanic genealogy websites that will help you with research, see:

https://www.heritagediscovered.com/blog/14-useful-free-resources-for-hispanic-genealogy

.A good overview of Spanish resources available through WikiTree may be found under the heading Category:Spain.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Spain

To see if you have famous relatives in modern or ancient Spain, go to Category: Notables, Spain and click on the "My Connections" button.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Spain%2C_Notables

To find famous relatives from modern or ancient Mexico, go to Category: Notables, Mexico and click on the "My Connections" button.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Mexico%2C_Notables

To find famous relatives from the region of South America, see the WikiTree Category: South America, here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:South_America

Within the 30 sub-categories listed, try Category:South America, Notables and click on the "My Connections" button here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:South_America%2C_Notables

On this Notables menu, you can actually drill down into the notable people from several South American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Sadly, WikiTree offers very few Featured Connections to people of Central and South American descent. Go to the Featured Connections page. Among the sub-categories, select Latin America, Featured Connections. Results: Only two profiles. Is that sad or what? Obviously WikiTree needs to do a much better job with South American family history in general.

WikiTree's Ancestor Explorer tool is definitely helpful for automated searches. Go to the Ancestors Explorer page. In the WikiTree ID field, enter your own ID or the ID of a famous person. For example, Cesar Chavez, whose WikiTree ID is Chavez-1101. Enter number of ancestors back = 25.

Choose among the following List Types:

• Spanish Monarchs
• Mexican-American War
• European Aristocrats
• European Monarchs
• American Immigrants, or
• Bio Text [any text of interest that might be in the biography]

Choose filters. Hit "Generate List" and wait patiently for two or three minutes. Searching Chavez-1101 against Spanish Monarchs gives zero results. Running his ID against "American Immigrants" picks up four of the immigrant ancestors of Cesar Chavez.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections. Or you can enter the WikiTree ID of Cesar Chavez to see if he has any relatives who were also famous Civil Rights activists.

Chavez has zero Spanish Monarchs in his family tree, because his tree has not been taken back very far. Guess who does have Spanish Monarchs in his family tree? Windsor-21, aka King Charles III, because Charles is royal and he has a family tree that goes back to the Middle Ages. It takes 20 minutes for the Ancestor Explorer engine to churn through such a big tree and finally spit out results.

My own ID, Shernick-1, was spit out much faster. Ancestor Explorer said I am related to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, the monarchs who sent Christopher Columbus to America in 1492.

List of Lineage Societies at Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides a very handy list of lineage societies, A to Z, at this link:

List of Hereditary and Lineage Organizations.

Please note the very important distinction Wikipedia makes between lineage societies and ethnic heritage groups: A lineage society traces the descendants of a handful of interesting people, like all the Pilgrims who arrived on board the ship Mayflower, or all the people who founded Jamestowne, Virginia.

Because the people in that boat, or joining that colony, may have been extremely different, in terms of their ethnic heritage, a lineage society does not necessarily assume a shared or identical ethnic heritage.

The language, culture, DNA and ethnic heritage of the thousands of soldiers who participated in the American Revolution, for example, may have been very, very different indeed.

A lineage society is not necessarily the same as an ethnic heritage group.

Descent from a single person, however, such as Pocahontas or a King of England, certainly may imply shared DNA and a shared ethnic heritage.

Example: Descendants of Pocahontas

Pocahontas was an Algonquin princess who married to an English colonist and travelled to England. Her descendants count themselves amongst the First Families of Virginia.

Yet several Algonquin tribal historians have claimed that Pocahontas was married within her own tribe before she was carried off by the English settler John Rolfe. They are more interested in tracing her native descendants than her descendants by Rolfe.

The family tree of Pocahontas and John Rolfe is outlined by David Moremus at the Pocahontas Descendants website here.

Among the lines of descent are a group called the "blue Bollings."

See The Bolling Family Association here.

Go to the Featured Connections Page. Choose the sub-category American Civil Rights Activists and click on the My Connections button to find your connections.

Example: Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent

A good example of a lineage society that does not necessarily imply shared DNA or a shared language and culture is the Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent (established 1867 in Philadelphia).

This lineage society requires only 1) that you be an American citizen, and 2) that you demonstrate royal descent, from a King or Queen of any country.

See their webpage here:

Sovereign Colonial Society of Americans of Royal Descent

Featured Royalty: How to Find Royal Family Fast

If the search methods described above sound slow and clumsy, you're right. There's a much faster way to find the royal ancestors and cousins in your family tree.

The fast way to find links to royalty is very simple on WikiTree: You just go to the Category: Featured Connections page. Scanning through the menu of options you will notice two yummy items: Category: Featured Royalty and Category: Scottish Royalty.

Go to the Category: Featured Royalty page here and click on the My Connections Button. This will quickly generate a long list of hyperlinked connections to international royal ancestors and cousins, and those who are direct relatives will be highlighted with the word "Ancestor" next to them.

By printing out this results page as a PDF, the hyperlinks are preserved and I can come back to the entire list and explore my royal cousins much more carefully later.

Using the Category: Featured Royalty list, my ancient royals marked "Ancestor" include:

• King Edward I (Plantagenet) of England
• King Louis IX (Capet) of France, aka St. Louis
• Queen Alienor of Aquitaine
• King Guillaume Normandie (aka William the Conqueror)
• King Brian Boruma (aka Brian Boru, the famous Irish King)
• King Valdemar den Store (aka Valdemar I of Denmark)
• King Konrad de Burgogne (aka Conrad I of Burgundy, France)
• King Harold Godwinson of Wessex (aka King Harold II of England)
• King Otto Liudofinger (aka King Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor)
• King Aelfred of Wessex, and
• King Karolus Magnus, aka Charles the Great or Charlemagne

One big problem with the Featured Royalty List is that your WikiTree ID has been run against a list of international royal WikiTree IDs selected at random by an unknown editor. It's not a complete list! Nowhere on this list does King Edward III appear. Nor does this list show my family's relationship to the House of Stewart.

As we have demonstrated clearly above, deliberately running your WikiTree ID against a carefully chosen king or queen may result in better results. Using the "automated list" method above provides some very, very interesting results fast, but the "Featured Royalty List" used also contains big, big gaps.

If I want to see Scottish Royalty, I need to go back up to the Category: Featured Connections menu level and scan the options more carefully. Bingo! Connections to the Stewart Family are hidden under Category: Scottish Royalty.

When I go to that subcategory page and click on the "My Connections" button, I quickly get an amazingly detailed list which includes lots of Stewart ancestors and cousins. When this list of Scottish Royalty is matched against my WikiTree ID, it generates a long list of ancestors: A total of 16 Scottish kings are highlighted as "Ancestors," going all the way back to Kenneth MacAlpin (810 - 858 A.D.).

I print out this long list as a PDF (which preserves the hyperlinks) and I have just saved myself a ton of work. I am a very happy camper indeed!

But there is one small problem: One must remember that this Scottish Royalty List skips over the nobility. For example, it skips entirely the Scottish lords and Barons who signed the Declaration of Arbroath.

The Older the Better: Descent from Ancient Royalty

Remember how we calculated the number of ancestors one MUST have in the year 1000 A.D., and how huge that number was?

Well what this huge number means, in practical terms, is that you are very, very probably related to ancient celebrities, such as Viking warriors, Celtic Saints or Merovingian Kings of France. In other words, the older the better: The further you go back in time, the greater the chance you are related to that famous person.

If we look at kings, for example, the chances that you are related to a very ancient king like Charlemagne or William the Conqueror are much, much better than the chance that you descend from a more recent king or queen, like Queen Victoria.

Example: Descent from Charlemagne

As luck would have it, proving one's descent from an ancient king like Charlemagne or William the Conqueror is also considered very desirable amongst English snobs.

So let's take a look at how ridiculous this snobbery is by using WikiTree to prove that even a slob like Mark Shernick, once he has plugged his family tree into the World Tree, can trace his lineage all the way back to Charlemagne.

First, who was Charlemagne?

For a free and colorful history of Charlemagne, who has been called "The Father of Europe," see the downloadable copy of All About History Issue 13 at Archive.org.

Anyone who has done a detailed family tree on WikiTree may attempt to trace their lineage to Charlemagne (748 - 814), WikiTree ID Carolingian-77, the founder of the Carolingian Dynasty (the early kings of the Holy Roman Empire).

For additional background, see All About History Issue 58 The Holy Roman Empire, the royal lineage that eventually became the Hapsburg Dynasty.

The WikiTree Relationship Finder says that my own profile has more than 100,000 paths back to Charlemagne. My paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw, has 77,946 paths back to Charlemagne.

For example, here is just one of the paths. Granny is supposedly a 32nd great -granddaughter of Charlemagne through this direct line of descent:

32nd great granddaughter:

• 1. Mildred is the daughter of Violet Belle (Perry) Shaw (1883-1967)
• 2. Violet is the daughter of Cora Belle (Stoddard) Long (1863-1955)
• 3. Cora is the daughter of Francisco Marion Stoddard (abt.1828-abt.1912)
• 4. Francisco is the son of William Stoddard (abt.1784-1854)
• 5. William is the son of Ruth (Needham) Stoddard (1756-)
• 6. Ruth is the daughter of Daniel Needham Jr. (1729-aft.1790)
• 7. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1703-1803)
• 8. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1679-1719)
• 9. Daniel is the son of Daniel Needham (1638-1717)
• 10. Daniel is the son of Edmund Needham (abt.1606-1677)
• 11. Edmund is the son of John Needham (1575-bef.1660)
• 12. John is the son of Robert Needham Esq (1535-bef.1603)
• 13. Robert is the son of Anne (Talbot) Needham (abt.1515-1565)
• 14. Anne is the daughter of John Talbot (1485-1549)
• 15. John is the son of Gilbert Talbot KG (1452-1517)
• 16. Gilbert is the son of Elizabeth (Butler) Talbot (1420-1473)
• 17. Elizabeth is the daughter of Joan (Beauchamp) Butler (abt.1396-1430)
• 18. Joan is the daughter of William (Beauchamp) de Beauchamp KG (abt.1343-1411)
• 19. William is the son of Katherine (Mortimer) de Beauchamp (abt.1314-abt.1369)
• 20. Katherine is the daughter of Joan (Geneville) de Mortimer (1286-1356)
• 21. Joan is the daughter of Piers (Geneville) de Geneville (abt.1255-bef.1292)
• 22. Piers is the son of Geoffrey (Joinville) de Geneville Knt (abt.1226-1314)
• 23. Geoffrey is the son of Simon (Joinville) de Joinville (abt.1190-1233)
• 24. Simon is the son of Helvis (Dampierre) Joinville (1145-1195)
• 25. Helvis is the daughter of Helvide (Vaudemont) Dampierre (1105-1165)
• 26. Helvide is the daughter of André (Vaudemont) Baudemont (1060-abt.1142)
• 27. André is the son of Hildouin (Montdidier) de Montdidier (abt.1010-1063)
• 28. Hildouin is the son of Hildouin (Montdidier) de Montdidier (abt.0980-1037)
• 29. Hildouin is the son of Helvide (Laon) Montdidier (0940-)
• 30. Helvide is the daughter of Roger (Laon) de Laon (aft.0890-0942)
• 31. Roger is the son of Heilwig (Friuli) di Friuli (aft.0836-aft.0895)
• 32. Heilwig is the daughter of Gisela (Carolingian) di Friuli (abt.0819-aft.0874)
• 33. Gisela is the daughter of Hludowic (Carolingian) of France (abt.0778-0840)
• 34. Hludowic is the son of Charlemagne Carolingian (abt.0748-0814)

This makes Charlemagne the 32nd great grandfather of Mildred, my grandmother.

Thus WikiTree makes it amazingly easy for Mark Shernick to go from slob to snob. All I had to do was to link my family tree to other families, going about five generations back, and WikiTree made the rest suprisingly easy.

Lineage Society: Order of the Crown of Charlemagne

If you are a descendant of this illustrious 9th-Century King, you may be eligible to join the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States:

https://charlemagne.org/

Lineage Society: Order of the Merovingian Dynasty

Formed in 1984, the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty looks like an exclusive club for fans of the Davinci Code and popular books on the Holy Grail.

But if you've proven your descent from Charlemagne, joining this lineage society should be a cinch, because Charlemagne is a direct, lineal descendant of the Salic Kings of France (Merovingians), who lived in the 5th Century.

For their strange history, see the webpage for the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty here:

http://merovingiandynasty.org/details.php?id=history#:~:text=The%20Order%20of%20the%20Merovingian%20Dynasty%20%28OMD%29%20was,records%20for%20and%20thus%20can%20develop%20lineages%20from.

Example: Descent from King Edward III

DNA is obviously the best way to match oneself with royal ancestors.

But first, to see if there is even a vague chance that I descend from a King of England, all I have to do is log into my WikiTree account and go to my own profile, Shernick-1. When my profile loads, I can click on the Family Tree & Tools Tab, and when that page loads I scroll way down to the ANCESTOR EXPLORER app mentioned above.

Clicking on the Ancestor Explorer link brings up the Ancestor Explorer search engine, with my WikiTree ID, Shernick-1, pre-loaded into the "WikiTree ID of Descendant" box. For "number of Ancestor generations back" I set the options to the maximum, 20. Under the "List Type/Criteria" box I then search the drop down menu and select the option "English Monarchs - Ancestors Who Were English Monarchs" and I hit the "Generate List" button.

WikiTree's database chews on the question for about three minutes and turns up the following list of English Monarchs connected to my WikiTree ID during the past 20 generations (about 500 years): 0.

Hm. That means zero English Kings connected to my WikiTree ID within the last 500 years. Should I give up? Heck no! English kings stretch back for more than a thousand years, and the mathematical chances that I am related to an ancient king are actually pretty good.

I take a different tack. I decide to go to the WikiTree profiles for famous medieval Kings of England (more than 20 generations back) and then, on their profiles pages, I will use the drop down menu under their WikiTree ID to search FORWARD for a "Relationship to Me."

That means I can go as far back in time as I want and the search engine is now saving lots of time by making a straight shot FORWARD in time to see if there is any direct relationship to any one of my direct ancestors.

Take for example King Edward the III, who lived in the 14th Century. What name does he hide under on WikiTree? If I Google the term "King Edward III + WikiTree" I find the result I want: He's hiding under the name "Edward (Plantagenet) of England (1312 - 1377)." I click on the hyperlink to pull up King Edward III's profile page.

Now all I have to do is use my mouse to hover over his WikiTree ID, Plantagenet-70, and sure enough, there's a drop down menu. At the very bottom of the menu is the option I want: "Relationship to Me." I click on the "Relationship to Me" button and voila! I find a direct line of descent to my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw.

Another approach would be to land on King Edward III's profile page, then click on the "Family Tree & Tools" tab for his profile. Scrolling way down, below his pedigree, to the WikiTree Tool menu, I look at the "Connections to Me" tool and within that block of text I select "Relationship Finder." With one click, it auto-loads King Edward III's ID into one box, Plantagenet-70, and my ID, Shernick-1, and gives a result in seconds: I am King Edward III's 19th-great grandson through my paternal grandmother Mildred Belle Shaw.

Surprisingly, beneath the lineage, I see a text message:

"Explore more: 12 different paths were found between Edward and Mark."

Using the drop down arrow, I discover that there is another path through my maternal grandmother, Bernice Libel. When I click on this I discover that I am a 20th grandson of King Edward III through Bernice. There is also a second (alternative) path from Edward to grandma Bernie that makes me King Edward III's 19th great-grandson, and this lineage leads through several ancestors named Stewart - members of the Stewart dynasty.

Conclusion: My family's strongest claim to direct descent from an English King is through the lineage of my maternal grandmother, Bernice (Libel) Gabriel. Bernice is allegedly a 17th great-granddaughter of King Edward III (1312 - 1377), a member of the House of Plantagenet.

For a colorful, free and downloadable summary of the British monarchy, see All About History Issue 2, British Royals at Archive.org. Edward III is featured on p. 46 here.

Note that Bernice claims descent through King Edward III's son, John of Gaunt (1340 - 1399), a Knight of the Garter and leading member of the House of Lancaster (represented by the Red Rose in the War of Roses).

The path of ascent from of Bernice (Libel) Gabriel to King Edward III through the Stewart family and Edward's son, John of Gaunt, looks like this:

17th great granddaughter:

• 1. Bernie is the daughter of Effie Frances (Smith) Libel (1891-1963)
• 2. Effie is the daughter of Isaac Albert B. Smith (1849-1914)
• 3. Isaac Albert is the son of Theodore George Smith (1825-1879)
• 4. Theodore is the son of Elizabeth (Hinchman) Smith (1799-1854)
• 5. Elizabeth is the daughter of Mary Ann (Perry) Hinchman (1775-1832)
• 6. Mary is the daughter of Elizabeth (McClung) Perry (abt.1757-abt.1798)
• 7. Elizabeth is the daughter of Rebecca (Stuart) McClung (1710-1781)
• 8. Rebecca is the daughter of Andrew Stewart (1672-1715) DNA confirmed
• 9. Andrew is the son of Robert Stewart (abt.1640-1686)
• 10. Robert is the son of Robert Stewart (bef.1629-1662)
• 11. Robert is the son of Andrew (Stuart) Stewart (1560-1629)
• 12. Andrew is the son of Margaret (Stewart) Stewart of Methven (abt.1539-1627)
• 13. Margaret is the daughter of Janet (Stewart) Stewart Lady Ruthven (1505-1566)
• 14. Janet is the daughter of John (Stewart) Stewart Second Earl of Atholl (aft.1475-abt.1521)
• 15. John is the son of John (Stewart) Stewart of Balveny First Earl of Atholl (abt.1440-1512)
• 16. John is the son of Joan (Beaufort) Queen Dowager of Scots (abt.1402-abt.1445)
• 17. Joan is the daughter of John Beaufort KG (abt.1371-1410)
• 18. John is the son of John (Plantagenet) of Gaunt KG (abt.1340-1399)
• 19. John is the son of Edward (Plantagenet) of England (1312-1377)

This supposedly makes King Edward III the 17th great-grandfather of Bernice and the 19th great-grandfather of Mark Shernick. This path was discovered with incredible ease by WikiTree. It just took some persistence and only an half hour of searching.

The hard part, of course, is verifying and documenting every single link in the lineage. To join a lineage group like The Plantagenet Society (established at Philadelphia in 1902) requires impeccable documentation. Even a single error could break the connection entirely.

But this is a great start!

Example: Descent from the House of Stewart

In the last section we saw that my grandmother Bernice can trace a path of ascent from her ancestors in Virginia to the House of Stewart, and from the House of Stewart to King Edward III, the House of Plantagenet.

This makes sense if you know the history of Virginia during the 1600s. During the English Civil War (1642 - 1651) the Stewart family fought hard to retain the throne of England, and they lost. Their supporters, known as Cavaliers, fled to Virginia in the New World, or they were transported to Virginia involuntarily as prisoners.

Either way, a large number of Stewarts and Stewart supporters landed in Virginia, and my maternal grandmother Bernice apparently descends from a branch of Virginia Cavaliers who had a very respectable pedigree indeed. She descends from a line of Stewarts who fled first to Ireland and lived for many years at Stewart Castle in Newtownstewart, County Tyrone.

An obvious question arises: Is it possible that Bernice can trace her lineage to some of the Stewart kings of Scotland?

To find out, we go to Bernice's profile, Libel-1, and use the same methods described above. Clicking on her profile's Family Tree & Tools tab, we go to the Ancestor Explorer search engine, set the number of generations back to the max (20), and in the "Select List Type" box we select a different option: Scottish Monarchs.

When we hit the "Generate List" button, we discover that Bernice actually has five ancestors within 20 generations who meet the criteria for Scottish Monarchs:

1. James Stewart (1430 - 1460), aka King James II of Scots
2. James Stewart (1394 - 1437), aka King James I of Scots, who married to Joan Beaufort (1402 - 1445), the granddaughter of John of Gaunt and great-granddaughter of King Edward III of England (above)
3. John Stewart (1337 - 1406), aka King Robert III of Scots, the father of King James I of Scots,
4. Robert Stewart (1316 - 1390), aka King Robert II of Scots, the founder of the Stewart dynasty and the father of King Robert III
5. Robert Bruce (1274 - 1329), Earl of Carrick and Lord of Annandale, better known as "Robert The Bruce," grandfather of King Robert II of Scots through his daughter Marjorie Bruce and her husband, Walter Stewart.

To learn more about these cats, we go to Archive.org and search the metadata with three simple letters: AAH. That pulls up all sorts of free and illustrated histories in the beautiful All About History (AAH) series, and within the results we spot an issue that looks like exactly what we want: AAH Issue 136 The Stuarts.

A close perusal of the contents, however, tells us that this is the story of the last Stuarts under King James II of England -- the story of the English Civil War during the 1600s.

For a peek at the early Stuarts of Scotland, there's a better option: AAH Issue 79 Royal Dynasties. An overview of the House of Stuart begins on page 38, and an illustrated pedigree may be found here.

But this takes us back only to King James IV of Scots. For the earliest Stewarts, then, we must turn to the House of Stuart pedigree provided by Wikipedia here, which cross-links nicely with articles on each individual king.

Again, this is a great start for anyone who wants a basic and cursory overview. The hard part will be proving every link in the lineage, with solid primary documentation. Of particular concern are those undocumented patches in Ireland and Virginia, all of which need to be confirmed and documented carefully.

Luckily, there are lineage societies that are happy to help with the research, including the Royal Stuart Society at royalstuartsociety.com and Stewart Society at stewartsociety.org, which offers a magazine, clan gatherings and Highland games. They also offer a DNA test for anyone who's interested in comparing their Y-DNA with that of King Robert II.

Exploring Hidden Nobility: Signers of the Declaration of Arbroath

To the Scots, the Declaration of Arbroath, signed 6 April 1320 by the Lords and Barons who supported Robert the Bruce in his fight for Scottish Independence, amounts to a Declaration of Independence.

To have one's name or seal attached to the famous declaration is a mark of honor.

WikiTree therefore has an entire page devoted to the Declaration of Arbroath Nobility. It's important to Google for hidden WikiTree pages like this one. You may miss out on a great resource that is not well advertised by WikiTree. If you have a category that cannot be found on the "Featured Connections" page, do not despair! Interested in Puritan Migration ships? Just Google "Puritan Migration ships + WikiTree" and the results may surprise you.

There could be an entirely hidden page on WikiTree completely devoted to your special interest.

More importantly: Keep an eye on the ANCESTOR EXPLORER app. Signers of the Declaration of Arbroath is actually a subcategory within the hidden menu on that app!

Using this hidden feature of the Ancestor Explorer app, I discover that, through my maternal grandmother Bernice Gabriel, my family are related to a dozen signers, including:

Duncan MacDuff (1289 - 1353), Earl of Fife - 1st Cousin 21 Times Removed and probably a direct ancestor to my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw, through the Clan Shaw

Sir Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray (1278 - 1332) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Sir Malise, 7th Earl of Strathearn (1278 - 1372) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Maol Choluim Lennox, 5th Earl of Lennox (1282 - 1333) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

William O'Beolan, Third Earl of Ross (1249 - 1322) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Walter Stewart, Sixth High Steward of Scotland (1298 - 1327) - 23rd great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

Sir Henry Sinclair, 7th Lord of Roslin (1265 - 1336) - 21st great-grandfather of Mark through Bernice Libel

More Hidden Nobility: Descent from Magna Carta Surety Barons

Magna Carta Barons are obviously a special feature of the Relationship Finder app. Because they lived in the 12th Century, the mathematical probability that you have some family on the list is surprisingly high. Worth a try!

A large WikiTree team has worked very hard on validating and expanding the family trees connected to these Barons, and it shows. To my amazement, my family may claim several lines of descent from Magna Carta Surety Barons.

Notably. my paternal grandmother, Mildred Belle Shaw (Shaw-6972) is:

• A 21st great-granddaughter of William D'Aubigny
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Hugh le Bigod
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Henry de Bohun
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Gilbert de Clare
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John Fitz-Robert
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert FitzWalter
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of William de Huntingfield
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John de Lacy
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William Malet
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William de Mowbray
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Saer de Quincy
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert de Ros
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Robert de Vere

My maternal grandfather, Lawrence Michael Gabriel (Gabriel-322) is:

• A 22nd great-grandson of William D'Aubigny
• A 22nd great-grandson of Hugh le Bigod
• A 23rd great-grandson of Henry de Bohun
• A 22nd great-grandson of Gilbert de Clare
• A 23rd great-grandson of John FitzRobert
• A 24th great-grandson of Robert FitzWalter
• A 24th great-grandson of William de Huntingfield
• A 22nd great-grandson of John de Lacy
• A 25th great-grandson of William Malet
• A 23rd great-grandson of William de Mowbray
• A 22nd great-grandson of Saer de Quincy
• A 23rd great-grandson of Robert de Ros
• A 22nd great-grandson of Geoffrey de Say
• A 22nd great-grandson of Robert de Vere

My maternal grandmother, Bernice (Libel) Gabriel, is:

• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William d'Aubigny
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Hugh le Bigod
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Henry de Bohun
• A 21st great-granddaughter of Gilbert de Clare
• A 21st great-granddaughter of John FitzRobert
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Robert FitzWalter
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of William de Huntingfield
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of John de Lacy
• A 24th great-granddaughter of William Malet
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of William de Mowbray
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Saer de Quincy
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Robert de Ros
• A 23rd great-granddaughter of Geoffrey de Say
• A 22nd great-granddaughter of Robert de Vere

Conclusion: It's a fairly safe bet to say that my family are related to the Magna Carta Surety Barons listed by WikiTree's Relationship Finder Quick Links.

Thank you, Magna Carta team! You're beautiful!

The 1619 Project

A group of journalists at the New York Times have launched a project to place slavery at the center of the narrative of American history.

Their argument is that slavery arrived in America in 1619, a year before the first Mayflower Pilgrim landed on Plymouth Rock (1620).

See a summary of their work at the Wikipedia article The 1619 Project. This is very definitely an ethnic group study, not a lineage society, but essential reading for genealogists.

Lineage Societies: Mayflower Descendants

See The Mayflower Society: General Society of Mayflower Descendants since 1897

Are you a descendant of one of the Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock aboard the ship Mayflower in 1620? The Mayflower Society estimates there are now 35 million descendants living.

For a list of some of the gateway ancestors, see: Mayflower Society - Wikipedia.

Lineage Societies: The Jamestowne Society

Members of the Jamestowne Society are descended from early settlers who lived or held colonial government positions in Jamestowne, Virginia prior to 1700, or who invested in its establishment.

See: The Jamestowne Society at Jamestowne.org

WikiTree Category: Jamestowne Society

Lineage Societies: Daughters of the American Revolution

From the Wikipedia article Daughters of the American Revolution:

"The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a person involved in the United States' struggle for independence. A non-profit group, they promote education and patriotism. The organization's membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of soldiers or others of the Revolutionary period who aided the cause of independence; applicants must have reached 18 years of age and are reviewed at the chapter level for admission. The DAR has over 185,000 current members in the United States and other countries. Its motto is "God, Home, and Country".

See: WikiTree Category: Daughters of the American Revolution here.