Burnis Genes

Last night Andrew and I stayed up waaaay too late perusing our ancestors on ancestry.com.

I read somewhere recently that they had acquired millions of war records and were going to make them available online for FREE until June 6.

I've been doing my family genealogy since I was 15 or 16 years old. I am totally into it.

So I got really immersed in it, and Andrew found records of his grandfather's trips back and forth between Italy and the U.S. It was very moving to see the ship manifests and the draft cards. We really enjoyed ourselves.

Perhaps most mindblowing of all, I found a number of "famous" people to whom I am related. This list includes Judy Garland, J.M. Barrie, Rousseau, Mahler, Louis Pasteur, Franz Liszt, Mendelssohn, JACK KEROUAC, Joan of Arc, and Oscar Stanton dePriest, the first African American elected to congress in the 20th century.

How bad ass is all that?

Oh, and the list includes Richard Nixon, but please don't hold that against me.

I always wondered if I was distantly related to Kerouac. After all, he is French Canadian, and that's where the majority of my own personal gene pool collects.