Are You Living Up to the Pedigree You Inherited?


By Deb Boelkes
Most of us have at least one ancestor in our family tree we are proud to claim as kin. Then there are those in our lineage we choose to ignore, hoping no one will discover we’re related to them. Some of us know little to nothing about our bloodlines. Some of us maintain copious ancestral records. Certainly, we each have countless forebearers who will forever remain a mystery.
My mother was born into the clan Calhoun—a surname revered by Southerners for over two centuries. Her parents first met when my Texas-born grandfather asked my very proper British-born grandmother, then just a teen-ager, to dance with him at a USO party when he was a “Doughboy” on leave in England, headed to the European battlefront in the midst of the first World War.
As the story goes, when my grandfather first met my grandmother’s prim and proper parents following the dance, he introduced himself as hailing from a family of Texas “cattle rustlers”—much to everyone’s chagrin. Thereafter, whenever the Texas cattle rustler sent love letters from the warfront to his beloved British girlfriend, her father intercepted and burned the letters in the fireplace, in attempts to forever keep the young lovers apart.