Waiting for Her Origins

Fiorella and Husband are doing the Ancestry.com thing, and his results have just come in. He's standard white bread, with 51 percent of his heritage from western Europe, 29 percent from Ireland, 12 percent from Great Britain, and the rest scattered in Scandinavia, Italy/Greece, Spain, and the European Jewish community.  There was also a miniscule salute, about 1/2 percent, to Asia, but Fiorella wants to know what happened to that Indian princess his mother wrote about in her family bio. Fio's also wondering if, when she gets her own results, the gypsy great-grandfather she's always heard about when she was growing up will meet the same fate. And what if it turns out that Fiorella, who has always touted her Slavic origins, is not as exotic and interesting as she's always hoped she is?

Oh well, one of her best friends, who grew up Jewish, did the Ancestry thing and turned out to be--surprise--half Irish. Maybe there's hope for Fiorella yet.

Здравствуйте, Друзья!

Fiorella is bemused by the fact that so much of her audience is in the old USSR.  Do her readers sense her Slavic bloodlines? Or are they themselves bemused by this weird American woman who writes about driveway rocks, her overgrown dog, her would-be writing career, her own psyche, and anything else that comes down the pike?  Maybe they're just practicing their English, getting all the idioms down.  Or maybe they're analyzing crazy Fio for a psychology class.

Whatever. Говорите со мной. Я могу прочитать русский язык.

Never Falls Far from the Tree

Turns out that Fiorella is half Rusyn, also known as Ruthene.  The Rusyns are a Slavic (what else?) populace native to the Carpathian mountains, but also with settlements in a narrow strip along the Slovakian border, which is where Fio's father's family hails from.

How exotic can you get?  Yet that side of the family is all as staid and steady as they come.

On the other hand, her mother's family is a mixed bag--Polish, German, Swiss, with even some English thrown in.  But in contrast to her staid paternal ancestry, this side of Fio's family is loaded with characters--a supposed gypsy, a mechanical genius or two, a witch, and a concert singer, to name a few.

Now you know why Fiorella is always coming up with yet another clever project, but she's solid as a rock.