I’ve always been interested in finding out more about my heritage. In 1980, my grandmother, Paul Marie McDavid, presented her 4 children with printed oral histories about her and my grandfather’s childhood. She compiled family pics into several photo albums and included pictures of older family members, trying to give as much information about each of them as she could. Everyone loved it. They read through the histories, looked through the photos, then put them away in drawers or boxes for safe-keeping and eventually they were buried in storage.
Occasionally, someone would recall one of the stories:
“Carl’s great-great grandfather stowed away on a boat from Ireland when he was 8 years old.”
“We have a General that fought in the Revolutionary War.”
Both stories have some truth to them and will eventually be revealed here.
Like most people in the COVID lockdown of 2020, I had to find things to do with my time indoors and the first thing to do was declutter. As I started going through boxes and boxes (and boxes) of my kids preschool art, photos and memorabilia (most of which needed to be tossed. I mean really…how many pictures of stick figure cows or paint-dipped handprints do you need to keep?), I ran across pictures of my own family and the oral histories left by my grandmother. It made me wonder…
In 2019, my mother took a DNA test through Ancestry.com. The results that came back were almost 75% Scottish, English, and Northwestern European with smaller percentages of Irish and French. Hmmm, I had always thought Henry and McDavid were Irish names and DeLacey was French so why were those percentages so low?
And so my journey began…