We Are Family!

 Years ago, when I was still doing volunteer work for The Salvation Army's Emergency Disaster Services through amateur radio connections, I was introduced to a man in TSA's employ with the same last name as mine.  The minister introducing us said, "Peg McNary, meet Steve McNary."  We shook hands, and Steve McNary said, "We're family!"  There's nothing unusual or funny about that, except that Steve was very black, and I am very white.  We both chuckled, but the irony wasn't lost on us.  Our color and our name didn't matter.  In the course of generations, we are ALL family.

I have friends who live just a mile from me here in Plainfield, IN.  We go to the same church.  Over time, we might have run into each other, but my real connection with Judy and Phil came through our children.  Their son and my daughter were married and produced our two common grandchildren.  Our kids divorced, but Judy and Phil and I never did.  Their son now lives with his second wife north of Chicago, close to the Wisconsin border.  My daughter lives with her second husband and the children in the Seattle area, 2,000 miles away.  Judy, Phil, and I have remained close, not just because we have grandchildren together, but because we genuinely care about each other.  We're family, sort of.  Not related by blood but rather by love.

But not so fast!  All is not always as it appears!

Over the years since our children's divorce, we have looked after each other.  Thanksgiving has always been a shared meal.  Either they come to my house or I go to theirs.  This year, with the COVID virus running rampant, we have had to change plans.  We won't be together, but we will be trading food.  Today, I was talking to Judy to finalize our food trade items.  We are both talkers and can get side-tracked.  We are both into genealogy, so she happened to mention that a cousin had called her, and we started talking about ancestors.  She mentioned that the cousin had traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower.  I threw in that I had just recently--like last week--found out that I had Mayflower ancestors, too.  Judy said a name that rang a bell with me.  If our information is correct, her Mayflower ancestor and my Mayflower ancestor were brother and sister, and we share common grandparents from 10 or 11 generations ago!  What are the odds that two people in a small town in Indiana, who became close friends by marriage, would actually be related by blood to people who came to this country on the Mayflower??  My mind is blown! 

There is no lesson to this story.  I mean, if we could go back far enough in our ancestry, we all come from a common source.  I'm just still in shock about this particular family connection.  Who knew?  What a strangely small world we live in!  We are all family, indeed!