I created these slides for the 3 September 2025 session of the of the University of Minnesota Retirees Association’s Family History Group, aiming to share how I figured out the identity of the person I refer to as biodude. The 3 sections of the presentation address Inheriting the Genealogy Bug, Collecting Some New Stories, and Renewing My Sense of Belonging. The day marked that I was one year into my retirement from UMinn.
Unlike earlier posts, the narrative of this presentation shares stories about the genetic grandmother and aunt I discovered more recently – and in discovering, I realized that I would have liked being around them. I also liked finding two people who have noses and hands like my own.
Session Description:
Who Are These People? Or, How a slew of Ancestry matches to descendants of the three wives of a Mormon convert banished from his Iowa family let me begin to acknowledge, on what would have been my raising up father’s 88th birthday, that my genetic makeup included a paternity surprise. In 2018, I became part of a burgeoning class of people whose DNA discoveries came with the label “Not Parent Expected.”
In this session, I’ll explore how and why returning to my trees made it possible for me to understand myself among the other people who’d “[not] gone missing” from my raising up, maternal, and biodude family genealogical stories across multiple generations.
The Google slide window just below, lets you stay on this page to move through the slides. Or if you’d like to also read the context and connecting information in the Notes for each slide, click on the “Google Slides” wording on view in the bottom right corner of slides frame below. This will open the full presentation as a new tab on your browser.
The Truth of Things 