(Ran originally in The Times and The News-Star Sunday, January 27, 2019)

So my ancestry DNA profile thingy came back in the mail this morning and, according to the profile results, I am “47 percent cornbread, 33 percent bacon, and 20 percent ‘Sir, you don’t even want to know.’”

It’s disheartening to learn the cold hard truth about something you felt you were certain of all along.

When people trace their ancestry, they always seem to find someone “famous” on their family trees.

There is always a Sir Walter Raleigh lurking back there, an Abagail Adams, one of the Caesars or a Beethoven or Bach.

It’s like when someone says they have been reincarnated. They were never a sausage or a wallpaper hanger in a previous life. They were a high ranking official in the Roman legion or one of the Wright Brothers or, at worst, Calvin Coolidge or kin to Bert Convy.

No one, ever, in a previous life was simply a catfish or a clerk or a cab driver. They always seem to have been some sort of person that they’ve perceived to have been a “star” on some level.

No one was ever a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker. Or plumber.

Now if I found there had been a plumber in our family line, I would hire one of those airplanes that could write it in the sky. Life is hard, but it would be a lot harder without plumbing. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again:

Plumbing puts both the prince and the pauper on even ground. If it backs up in your body or in your bathroom, the game is at a standstill until that gets fixed.

A world without plumbers would be completely backed up. No “rolling with the flow.” A world without plumbers is one best described by the Billy Murray character in the original “Ghostbusters”: “Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!”

Can’t remember what he was talking about, but he was probably describing a world rampant with ghosts. And with no one who knew how to use either a pipe wrench or a plunger.

One of my uncles, inching toward 80 but the youngest of five children and so the most proficient with the computer — and the one with the most energy — has for real been tracking our ancestry for a while now. Mainly he’s just trying to get history down for the next generation, God bless him. Also most of us in our family are gluttons for punishment.

“Thought I might find some royalty among the Allens are Grays,” he told me; those are the families on my grandad’s side. “Nothing but wannabes and questionables.”

That is exactly what he said. I just love that. “Nothing but wannabes and questionables.” Great book title.

S0 as we suspected, we are sort of mistakes of nature, at least according to that particular limb of the family tree.

Grandmomma might have had a little more game. Before she married an Allen, my dad’s mom was Inez Skipper. My uncle discovered that Inez, his mom and my grandmom, is a direct descendant of Edward III of England, who was King of England and Lord of Ireland. (A King and a Lord, the Daily Double!) Rev. William Skepper/Skipper is the ancestor from Edward to my grandmother.

So we have some royal blood in us, but only a drop or two, so no big deal. King, Lord, and a Reverend. That’s all we bring to the party. But still no verified plumbers.

Sometimes — or at least in the case of my family — it’s probably better not to know the truth.

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