Puzzling the Puzzle

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Date Line February 25, 2007

Puzzling the Puzzle: connecting the dots, and hoping that they aren’t smudges on the paper. That appears to be what I am engaged in; possibly it has been my life’s work.

Genealogy. Who am I? Where did I come from ? What am I doing here? It was not, and is not, unusual for me to reach a point where I walk around wondering: Who I am; What I am doing; And Why.

Where is the missing piece? Why doesn’t the puzzle just fall neatly into place? Are all the pieces here? Of course not! They never are. If they were, there would be no puzzle to solve – no reason for being, and no frustration over their absence.

What is it that is known? The biography which initiated the search? Yes, that is known – or knowable: a child, adopted, his papers retained by his lawyer father, mixed feelings destroy what should have been kept, and then the quest to rediscover that which is gone.

Parental love, and parental ambivalence – three to one, or love, three for four. That was the score when they all died. That is the pattern of concern carried throughout life; a pattern ingrained in the genes.

Is it a pattern which can be overcome? Or is it inherited/ Not relevant to our puzzle; rather a puzzle of its own to be addressed by those who have interest in addressing such things.

Puzzling the Puzzle. What is know? The search, a find, acquisition of knowledge – a starting place. This is the genealogy – the bloodline quest, which shifts from blood shout to blood whisper.

The should? A yDNA line heritage which is well documented, and which extends back to an apparent orphan and the American families his line would intertwine. From them we have the pedigree – all those secondary non-gender genetic contributors.

Pedigree? Do we build on minor elements, even though they be great kings, monarchs, Saints, sinners, and forces of western culture? Is that what we would boast about?

Do we proclaim pedigree ancestors came on the Mayflower, or were here when it arrived – having settled in Virginia; or having arrived before Columbus, may have provided Columbus with the information needed to justify his voyage?

No, No, No claim is made of the ancestry of what might have been lost in the generations of genetic mix – or might only represent one strand among millions, possibly represented only as a piece of waste DNA of no meaning to the whole.

It is yDNA – that which travels with minimal change throughout the ages – which is the puzzlement puzzling the puzzle.

Who shares these markers, these unique constructs of limited number – which, like the life that carries them, walk the border of history. Is it possible that they have the importance which the dots would seem to indicate?

Puzzling the Puzzle begins with the one marker DYS394, now known as DYS19, and carrying a values of 17 in a range from 19 to 10. In the scheme of things, that 17 falls into a group that is quiet unique – it traveled from the Levant (where the first garden, agriculture, was discovered) across the world to the east on what is now called the Silk Road, but appears to be the pathway for those ancient religions which we accept as both modern and dominant.

Puzzling the Puzzle: The dots argue that this genetics quest has revealed the founders of faith, the scriptural “Sons of G-d”, the “Men of Renown” – maybe even the genetic line of the first Buddha.

Puzzling the Puzzle: Disnerving those of narrow mind, and limited chance of attaining “Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding” – those traits which seem to be the universal goal of this genetic bloodline.

Puzzling the Puzzle is what we are engaged in – in this quest for the Shreknangst ancestor.
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