A Final Thought: Waiting on the DNA results
By Mitch Allen
When my mother passed away back 2012, she had been the keeper of the family’s genealogical records. She had written several books about our lineage and once served as the president of the Snipes Family of America, an association dedicated to researching the Snipes family which hails from England. At one point I was the editor of the association’s newsletter, which was called, “The Snipes Hunter.”
Clever, huh?
Upon her death, all of Mom’s records—boxes and boxes of them—fell to me and my sister. We donated some to a county library that seemed to specialize in some of our family names and the rest ended up in my basement here in Northeast Ohio.
I have carried on Mom’s efforts as best I could and now have most of our family lines going back to the 1600s or early 1700s. We’re mostly English, with names like Kent, Green, Pinkston, Knighton, Morgan, Rodgers and Smith. But we’re also Scottish and Irish, with ancestral names like Allen, White, and MacPherson.
But one family line—the Shavors—stops cold in 1861 Alabama. That’s the line rumored to have descended from Native Americans, perhaps Cherokee or Muscogee (Creek). Mom could never prove it and I haven’t had any luck either, so I finally ordered one of those DNA kits from Ancestry.com.
I spit into a vial and sent it off a couple of weeks ago. The lab is running behind schedule so I expect to find out if I have Native American ancestors sometime in the next two to three months. Until then, I’ll stick with what I’m already convinced is true: Many of my ancestors came from Ireland and that authorizes me to discuss St. Patrick’s Day, which my Irish relatives sometimes refer to as “Amateur Night.”
St. Patrick was a 5th-century Catholic missionary who was born in Roman Britain and is credited with converting Ireland to Christianity. Legend holds that he used the shamrock as a metaphor to explain the Trinity to Irish pagans. He reportedly spent many years evangelizing in Ireland where he converted thousands of people. His efforts against the Druids became an allegory in which he “drove the snakes out of Ireland.” As I understand it, Ireland doesn’t have any native snakes and never did. Patrick is said to have died on March 17.
The wearing of green on St. Patrick’s Day may refer to shamrocks or it may simply be that green is symbolic of Irish Catholics while orange is symbolic of Irish Protestants ever since 1690, when William of Orange (William III), the Protestant king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, defeated King James II, a Roman Catholic, in the Battle of the Boyne near Dublin.
St. Patrick’s Day falls in the middle of the Lenten fast, so the wild partying may stem from the idea that the Catholic Church would historically lift restrictions against certain foods and alcohol for the day.
The holiday is hugely popular around the globe. There are obviously many annual St. Patrick’s Day parades in U.S. cities like Cleveland, Boston, and Washington, D.C., but you’ll also find parades in Buenos Aires, Moscow and Tokyo. It’s like they say, “Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Now, give me a couple of more months and science will finally confirm whether I truly am Irish and maybe even Cherokee.
Or something else entirely.
For there’s one thing I’ve learned in my study of genealogy: You just never know.