Jess is talking about her trip to Ohio.

And you know, one of the things that makes me sad? I'm basically rootless. I live somewhere now where no one in my family (at least, as far as I know) has ever lived. Even my parents don't live where their parents lived - and so on, back through the family. If I wanted to see headstones from my ancestors, I'd have to go all over the place - Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa and Louisiana and various New England states. I know bits and bobs of family history - little tantalizing facts like that I had a great-great-uncle on the German side of the family who was an opera singer, and another who designed scientific instruments, or that apparently on my mom's side of the family, I am related to 12.5% of the people who came over on the Mayflower (which probably qualifies me to belong to some kind of social society that wouldn't really want me and where I wouldn't really fit in). But I don't have any sense of continuity - I can't go to a particular town and look around and go, "this is where my people are from" and that makes me kind of sad.

I remember years ago, on a family trip to Massachusetts - going to some of the little towns and searching around, trying to find the thread of my mom's early Ames ancestors and not being able to definitively locate any of them.

I also don't have a clear "heritage" - I'm a big mix of things - some Irish, some German, some Scots, some British, possibly some French. It's not like friends I had in school who were Italian all the way down - or Irish, or Chinese, or whatever. And they had all kinds of family traditions that the other fullblood Italian or Chinese or whatever kids recognized. And in my family, we had kind of a pastiche, kind of a bloodless WASP version of things - oh, we had a few special German foods, and maybe a few things passed from my mom's Scots ancestors - but it wasn't like the kids who had a whole chunk of special celebrations or special holiday rituals that told them who they were, where they came from.

And you know? I kind of wish that I came from that sometimes. I kind of wish that I could, for example, make really good lasagne and have people laugh heartily and say, "Well, you know, she comes by it honestly..." meaning that my family was probably making lasagne for as long as lasagne existed...Oh, I make red cabbage and German meat patties and things like that, but it's mostly recipes I've found in books, not things passed down in the copperplate hand of some ancestress. I have my great-grandmother's fruitcake recipe, which I like to fancy goes back many many years and is kin to the old Scots Dundee cakes, but I don't know for sure. And it's the not KNOWING for sure knowing that gets me - I'm not the kind of person who can confabulate family history to myself, so I hang onto what little scraps I have and just those scraps. But you know? I wish I had enough scraps of family history to make a quilt out of, because when I hear the people who've lived here forever talk about things that happened in high school - or trace back the kinship of someone who just died ("Oh, she was a Chalk." "No, she was a Greider; you're thinking of her brother's wife who was a Chalk.") it seems a little cold and the few bits of my past I know seem kind of ragged...