1. I've no current serious interest in genealogy, mainly because I'm defensive about my origins and upbringing, yet I consider it a fascinating study that can help us learn a lot about ourselves, including our idiosyncrasies, habits and other behaviors. I love that liturgically we worship with everyone and with all creation, past, present and future and I love how the sacraments are acts of the
entire Church in every place and time. As insecure, angry and otherwise not very positive as I can be when people start talking about their families and ask me about mine, I know I can rejoice in my multitudinous baptismal relationships. 2. About ancestral countries, nations and peoples and partly referencing my response to #1, as an adult I finally found out that my great-grandfather, my father's dad, was an immigrant Russian Pennsylvania coal miner. On my mother's side, my great-grandfather was Irish, though since he was nominally Prot I don't know if John/Sean Lang was Scots-Irish or ethnic Irish. He immigrated to Canada and rode on minor-league tracks for minor-league stables. I definitely have some Dutch, German, generic British Isles and other assorted sundry ancestors and yearn to be a little bit of everything since each ethnicity has at least stereotypical traits anyone would like to claim, most of those based in history. And the food, too, needless to say!
3. Great-great-great-grandmother Eliza Close is the farthest back ancestor whose name I know.
4. Regarding favorite saints or notorious sinners, my grandfather, who was raised Southern Presbyterian and would not attend church outside the South (no or not enough hell, fire and brimstone), said his uncle William P was a circuit rider, many of whom were methodist, some baptist and their ranks including Lutheran Henry Melchior Muhlenberg.
5. I want my descendants to remember that I'm tough, driven, creative, almost too persistent yet highly inpatient with people and circumstances at times.
Although I don't have a bonus a song, prayer, or poem, I've illustrated this with one of a series of drawings I made for a color theory class. And, I'll conclude saying that I love Sophia's "family—blood or chosen."
Beautiful play! And I know now, if I understand you correctly, that the surname was acquired through marriage....Always wondered if you were Asian or partly so.
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