My mother was a Scottish Protestant from Cape Breton, and my father was an Irish Catholic from Halifax…

Naturally, my first joke was…

“I was the only person in my neighborhood who could say for certain that he wasn’t the product of incest!”

Their relationship was doomed from the beginning, stewed in that ancient religious war where both sides worshiped or mostly didn’t worship the same God.

By fluke my mother and I ended up living in this small community where we were outsiders, not related to anyone and everyone there seemed to be family.

A D.N.A. test shows that my Great Great Great Grandmother was born there. I asked an old friend, a local genealogist, if that meant I was related to some of the people who had the most common last name? He said, “No. It means you’re related to them all.”

Then he added, “You were right where you should have been. “