Bad Apples in the Family Tree

They say your ancestors are inside of you. Even genetically speaking.

That’s fine and dandy when your family history research turns up philanthropists and saints- you know, a George Washington or a Gandhi. You beam with pride when you tell people that the blood of Benjamin Franklin flows through your veins (implying, of course, that you are bound for the same greatness achieved by your ancestor).

Occasionally, however, you get on Ancestry.com or search the old parish records and find out you’re the descendant of some less-than-savory characters: drunkards, womanizers, or lunatics. Then the proposition of having these scary ancestors swimming around in your gene pool becomes quite disturbing.

Here’s how one of our family stories goes. An Irishman made his way to the Hawaiian Islands in the late 1800s and wooed and married a young native widow, the possessor of a large piece of prime real estate on Oahu’s north shore. He sired several children with her. Not many years later, he made a shady deal with the owner of a ship full of rum: his wife’s land for the ship. He gave away his wife’s inheritance for his love of alcohol and sailed away on his new boat never to be seen again, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. Oh, and did I mention that land sits just a few miles from the Turtle Bay resort? We could have been gazillionaires, the Rockefellers of the islands!

Well, maybe not, but knowing that this drunk Irishman’s DNA is a part of my sequence bugs me. It gets me thinking: Is my genetic inheritance tainted by his presence in my family tree? Did he pass on his reckless ways somehow to me?
I suppose it all depends on your philosophy. If you believe that humans, to a large extent, act according to the dispositions handed down to them by their ancestors, you should be worried. Either that or hope that there is a George Washington in there to balance things out.

However, if you believe that, for all the genetic hodge podge we inherit at birth, our choices determine our destiny, then I guess you’re fine (unless you choose to sell off your estate for a shipload of rum and leave your family destitute).

Do you have some bad apples in the family tree? How do you view their influence in your life?