Christmas 2018

This year my youngest sister, M, drove up from Texas for Christmas with her husband and two sons. Because my brother-in-law is Latino and my dad is a racist dick, we didn't spend the holiday at my parents' house as usual, but at my sister J's house instead.

This year M gave my mom a DNA test from Ancestry.com. Tests from 23AndMe.com and Ancestry.com have become a popular gift in recent years. They purport to help you find long-lost relatives by looking for genetic similarities, allowing you to fill in the gaps in your family tree.

While these tests may have provided some entertainment and insight, they have also caused a lot of problems and heartache. By this time, thousands of people have discovered that the man who raised them is not their real father, that mom cheated on dad or their mother was raped.

Entire family histories are being rewritten as people try to establish whether grandma really was Irish, or German, or American Indian. Elizabeth Warren has injected DNA testing into the presidential race.

Neo-Nazis are finding out that they're not as racially pure as they thought they were, and are not at all happy about it.

And family DNA tests are being used to find serial killers. The most famous of these is the Golden State Killer, who was found by investigators through a commercial online DNA database. Actor Patton Oswalt and his wife, Michelle McNamara, who was writing a book about the serial killer when she died in 2016, are largely responsible for keeping the public spotlight on the case.

Now, these DNA tests are nowhere near as accurate as the companies that sell them pretend they are. They've picked out a few genetic markers that are indicative of ethnicity, but because the databases are incomplete and genetic inheritance is random, these results are nowhere near definitive.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve M pulled me aside and in a grave whisper told me that, based on DNA testing and Ancestry.com, our maternal grandfather had lived under an assumed name.

She hadn't told our mom yet, and wanted it kept quiet. But she was clearly disturbed by the revelation.

We never knew anything about grandpa, except that he had come up from the South sometime in the 1920s. He came to live with us when my grandmother died of breast cancer in the 1960s. After her death he started drinking heavily, imbibing the "white lightning" he made on his hog farm, which had an outhouse and no electricity (though he did have a phone).

He collapsed one day and lost the use of his legs. I never knew exactly what the problem was, but now I'm guessing alcoholic neuropathy.

Ancestry.com connected M to a family in the South, and a genealogy tree with a man, AH, who'd gone missing in the 1920s. Photos of the man's nephews, who died years ago, were dead ringers for my grandfather.

According to the family history my sister dug up, AH was a moonshiner -- prohibition was still in effect in the 1920s. The cops broke up AH's still and were after him, but before he left town he tracked down one of the cops and shot him dead in a church.

How reliable is this narrative? Is it just a story someone made up to explain a missing uncle? And just how accurate are these DNA tests anyway?

Is it wise to ruin my mother's memory of her father, branding him a murderer after all these years? My sister hasn't mentioned any of this to my mom yet; she's still waiting on Ancestry.com for the results of my mother's DNA swab.

But why not just tell her now? If grandpa wasn't a murderer, she'll tell my mom because it's such an interesting story. And if he was, she's still going to tell my mom because why would she go through all this effort and expense to verify it, only to keep it a secret? She just wants to know.

But it really shouldn't matter to my mom. Despite the paltry jealousies of Old Testament and Greek gods, the sins of fathers should not be visited upon their sons and daughters.

At this point, the truth about my grandfather is purely academic. He's been dead for 25 years, and we'll never know what happened with absolute certainty, so whatever my sister finds out it won't change anything, except perhaps to cause my mother sorrow.

My grandfather's drunken actions almost a century ago have no bearing on my mother. Unless, of course, she knew about what he did and kept it a secret, or continued to say what a great guy he was after learning he was a murderous moonshiner.

Which brings to mind the hypocrisy of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other apologists for Civil War traitors. Confederate soldiers went to war to keep human beings enslaved. They either believed in slavery or were cowed by the slave masters who ran their states into committing treason against the United States and killing their fellow Americans.

The treason and defense of slavery by Confederate soldiers should not reflect poorly on their descendants. But by refusing to acknowledge their ancestors' crimes, Civil War apologists inherit their ancestors' crimes, branding themselves as liars, racists and traitors.

It's rather ironic that, if the story about grandpa is true, my father harbored a drunken murderer for more than 20 years. Yet he won't let the stable, solid, gainfully employed father of his own two grandsons into his house because he's Latino.