Our columnist looks at his family tree and has to realize: some branches lead to the dark German forest and the impending insanity
I’ve been interested in genealogical research for a while. Where do I and my family come from? Who are my ancestors? What did they do?
The trace of my ancestors is lost on both sides of the family in a relatively short past. We can look back about 150 years, before that lies fog and legends. My Bavarian ancestors are said to have immigrated from Romania as traveling people. And the people I grew up with have always been farmers.
On the Internet I then discovered various advertisements from genealogy platforms, Ancestry and MyHeritage for example, some of which have billions of documents, family trees and references and advertise that you can suddenly trace your family history back to the Middle Ages and further and are therefore able to would be to understand who you are and why you are the way you are.
There is also the opportunity to discover new relatives. Maybe this includes people who live very close to you, whom you have met a thousand times. You just don’t know yet. Or you are related to great, smart or famous people and can contact them. That would be great for me, so I could leave the narrow and genetically limited framework of my current family, all the smallness, stupidity and ugliness, and finally join the higher classes of society, which I have suspected since my youth that I actually belong to .
I imagine myself in doctor or jeweler circles, I could also imagine a politician or banker family as suitable. Of course, I would prefer an old noble family. (By the way, even when driving a car as a driver of an old Volvo, I only greet the vehicles that are superior to me, i.e. the Porsche Cayennes and Mercedes AMGs – as a sign that we actually belong together.)
Perhaps I also have relatives in beautiful countries and regions that I could visit from now on and who are happy to finally welcome the prodigal son in their midst. In addition, through a THEN test one can find out how many parts of world origin one carries in oneself and whether one has questionable genetic predispositions.
I then signed a contract with the world’s largest platform for 65 euros and started feeding them data. You have to give the system clues as to where you’re from, who your parents and grandparents are. The more you reveal, the more you can learn. You also send a saliva sample to a laboratory.
After a while, the clues will come in. I have to say that this process was really exciting. After about two weeks, the information slowly began to condense for me: In my family tree there are two encounters with other family lines to which I have been related for centuries. These are my “lost relatives” so to speak.
On the maternal line, I am closely related to a Lindner family from Westphalia, a clan of very successful business people. In my case, the other track leads to Braunau in Austria. However, the results are not yet entirely clear. Shortly thereafter, the DNA results came in. They were surprising: Actually, I should have had Parkinson’s for a long time. It’s only a matter of time before this chapter in my life starts. In addition, after 60 I have a difficult cross-mutant of galloping Alzheimer’s.
On the whole, however, I am very satisfied with my results, as I have learned the following about myself: I am genetically a mixture of Christian Lindner and Adolf Hitler, will be in a wheelchair in a year at the latest and have a life expectancy of about 2 years.
The investment has really paid off.
Rocko Schamoni: “Christian Lindner in his wedding dress”
This and other images are by Rocko Schamoni here orderable.
Author photo by Kerstin Behrendt