I don’t know a whole lot about my lineage. It seems safe to say that my family didn’t come over on the Mayflower, or I would probably have heard about it, right? From the little information we have, it’s more likely that most of my ancestors came to the New World much more recently, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On an encouraging note, that means my family is probably off the hook for ever having owned any African slaves. I’m told that my niece and nephew, however, are related by way of my brother-in-law’s family to Jefferson Davis. But that’s their karmic burden to work out. As for us Gumnicks, it’s more probable that our ancestors were somebody else’s slaves—or “serfs,” as they were called back when European white people owned other European white people.
When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.
So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.
As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.
Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”
Note: The assignment was to write a story about some aspect of “lineage.”
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
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