I felt a gust of breath and then a soft, firm tap on my crown and the damp spray of a snort. Anyone can receive the blessing of the temple pachyderm for a few rupees, which the elephants are trained to collect with their trunks. It's nearly as common as incense in south India. But at the end of that long day, near the end of a journey I once said I'd never make, in search of some connection to an ancestry I'd never known, it meant something to take part in that ancient Hindu ritual. It may have been a sacred rite to some long-forgotten ancestors, before we, like so much of the world, split from our tribes and our gods. The symbolism of the act was powerful to me all the same, maybe even spiritual on some undefinable level – to feel small and vulnerable beside this big, timeless rock, on my knees before a beast that could crush me with a sneeze – the six-tonne pet of the Kurumbas; the workhorse of the British; an icon of wisdom, memory, India, and, of course, the circus.Here's the thing about being Canadian: We so embrace the idea of being a multicultural country, celebrating the great mosaic of nationalities that have found their homes here, that in addition to the frequent public festivals that honour this or that heritage, school kids are routinely told to write a report on interesting cultural traditions they celebrate at home, or to bring an exotic dish to school to share with the class. Having lived in Canada for many generations, mine and my husband's backgrounds combined to make a couple of Heinz 57 kids, and with one grandfather who is half Italian, my two little redheads often clung to this as the most exotic fruit on their family tree, toddling off with a pot of inauthentic spaghetti or ersatz antipasto. Having come to Canada from England in the 70s, author Carolyn Abraham encountered the same atmosphere, and when she asked her mother, “What are we anyway?”, her mother would reply, “Just say we're British. I'll make Yorkshire Pudding for your class.” Somehow, little Carolyn knew that their history was more complex than that, and when she grew up to become an investigative science journalist, she eventually endeavored to learn the truth. The Juggler's Children is the extraordinary tale of Abraham's search for her family history – through written records, emerging DNA technology, and networking with other amateur genealogists – and with clearly explained science, several trips to exotic locales, and an engaging storytelling style, Abraham unravels an intriguing, personal family tale that becomes universal to all of us.
Granted, most of us wouldn't have as provocative a jumping off point as Abraham: She was born in England, to Anglo-Indian parents who had emigrated from India not long before her birth. Neither of her parents had much information about their family trees – there might be some Portuguese in there somewhere – but each harboured a mystery. One of Abraham's great-grandfathers (on her mother's side) was a celebrated Jamaican Sea Captain who died young of beriberi, and another great-grandfather (on her father's side) was rumoured to have been a Chinese juggler (transplanted to India's hill country) who abandoned his young children when his wife died. As this was at the dawn of consumer genetic testing, Abraham started by taking cheek swabs of her relatives and uploading the results to internet databases. As matches with other users began to trickle in, what Abraham discovered would prompt correspondence with potentially new relatives and lead her and her family on trips around the world.
I had heard before of Mitochondrial Eve (the one ancestral woman who passed her mitochondrial material down to all of us through the matrilineal line), but I had never before heard of “Genetic Adam”:
Thought to have lived about 59,000 years ago, this Adam (unlike the Biblical Adam) is not cast as the first man on Earth but rather as the one man whose male descendants survived to populate the rest of the planet.Because of the nature of the Y chromosome, males can easily have their direct patrilineal line traced back to origin groups, with the interesting caveat that even thousands of years ago, groups were mixing and interbreeding and there's no such thing as a “pure” race anywhere on earth. Abraham was able to swab direct male descendants of each of her missing great-grandfathers (an uncle and a brother), but was frustrated when she didn't get many matches with other users (and especially in the Chinese line as the technology isn't popular among the Chinese today). She was also discouraged by the lack of official information to be found about her female ancestors:
Women are relatively absent in historical paper trails. Women too rarely wrote wills or paid taxes, joined the military or owned property. More often they themselves were property.One thing Abraham learned from her research was that roughly ten percent of users will discover that their fathers aren't their biological parent. Oops. Another thing she had to get her mind around: If your research leads you to a Jamaican sugar cane plantation, are you prepared to learn that your ancestor was a slave? Or a slave owner? Slightly off-topic because it is, coincidentally, in the news today: Due to a regulatory loophole, American companies are able to market health-risk genetic tests here in Canada, and loads of people are sending off to find out if they are predisposed to certain cancers or whatever. Just today, Parliament is discussing a bill that will prevent Life Insurance companies from discriminating against a person's results from these tests (not health insurance; this is still Canada), but the idea that you might be denied life insurance because of a known pre-existing condition might give a person pause before sending off the cheek swab (besides the potentially devastating results that the layman might have trouble interpreting; there's a reason other countries don't allow these tests for the home consumer).
Abraham has a knack for explaining the science without making this feel like a science book (and to anyone who might say that the science has evolved enough in the past few years to make this obsolete, it's still a valuable record of its own time), and also for making me care about her own personal history (until some things got a bit repetitive). Ultimately, anyone who shakes their family tree might find a few surprises tumbling out, but go back far enough, and we're all related anyway. I enjoyed this read very much.
