The Jonakait family has not been particularly interested in family history. When I reported that a grade school classmate bragged that Abe Lincoln was somewhere in his background, my father responded, “And if he looked hard enough, he would also find a horse thief in the family tree.” My mother told me that when she was asked to fill out a form as a schoolgirl about her ethnicity, her father replied, “It’s none of their damn business. Just tell them your family is New England Yankee.”

Although none of my immediate family has studied our ancestry, one of my mother’s seven (or eight?) sisters produced an extensive family tree. My mother’s maiden name was Dewey and the tree placed its roots back to 1600 England. My maternal grandmother, who died long before I was born, was a Clement, whose roots went back to ancient England and Holland. The chart claimed that the progenitor Deweys came to America on the third or fourth boat after the Mayflower. That amused me. The passengers on the Mayflower are well documented as they might be for the next boat. I am not sure, however, that passenger manifests exist for later vessels. Who can prove you wrong if you claim the family came over in the late 1600s?

It is clear, however, that this side of my family is WASP. The tree-forming aunt did not appreciate it when I said, “You mean we are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and came to America before 1700. And yet we are all poor. Is this something to be proud of? What does that say about our stock? Certainly we have no excuses for our lack of wealth.”

Another part of the family tree did interest me. A nineteenth century branch noted that a female ancestor lived in upstate New York and was named Freelove Dewey. I wonder how that played out for her.

I know little about my father’s parents, even though they lived in the flat above us on Tenth Street. I never discussed anything with my grandparents about their lives. I am confident, however, that my grandmother was born in what was then Germany but is now Poland. She came to this country when she was 16-18, I think. I never heard mention of any siblings or of her parents. I assume the teenager came alone, a trip in my youth I did not think much about. I know that she strongly disliked Germany, and although my father went to a Lutheran school, she also had disdain for the church.

My paternal grandfather was born in Pennsylvania to what I was told was a German immigrant family, but perhaps it was a Lithuanian family since the part of Pennsylvania where he was born had many Lithuanian immigrants. My grandfather’s family, legend has it, moved back to Germany, but my grandfather stayed in America. I have no idea how he ended up in Wisconsin or how he met my grandmother. I don’t know what he might have done before, but he I know that he worked in the Kohler Company factory for 35 years.

I have often been asked the derivation of the Jonakait name. Most times I answer that it is a corrupted Lithuanian name. Those who know better than I say that it has Lithuanian roots but is no longer Lithuanian. Those names almost invariably end in “as” or “us.” It is clear, however, that the name was changed before anyone came to the U.S. My theory: At one time Lithuania bordered what was then East Prussia in Germany. I think a Lithuanian family moved to East Prussia and the name became modified to become less Lithuanian and more German. I think of my father’s roots as German, not only because of the altered name. Lithuania is a Catholic country that had a significant Jewish population. East Prussia was Lutheran, and my grandfather identified as Lutheran. I believe he spoke Lithuanian, although I never heard it, but I know he spoke German with his friends and his wife. My father spoke some German, but no Lithuanian. I also think of Jonakait as German because when I have googled the name, I have found a few with the name or close to the name in Germany, almost always in eastern Germany, and none in Lithuania.

One thing is clear: there are few of us Jonakaits. Some are sprinkled around the country with slightly altered spellings—Jonakeit, Jonekait, etc.—but not many. Outside of my immediate family, I never met another Jonakait.

This lack of ancestral knowledge does not bother me. Even though I know that it can’t be entirely true, I want to think that I am my own creation. However, part of who I am surely came from my parents, and then part of who my parents were, surely came from their parents. So ancestry must make some difference. There is some truth in the Chinese proverb, “To forget one’s ancestors is to be a book without a source, a tree without a root.” It must be, however, the further you go back in the ancestral tree, the less influence today and the more irrelevance. I want to be judged on what I think and do, not on who my great grandparents were or weren’t. As Russian General Mikhail Skobeleff supposedly said, “I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate.” (He clearly didn’t live in 19^th century England.) Andoche Junot, another general, this time Napoleonic French, when asked about his ancestry, put it more succinctly, “I know nothing about it. I am my own ancestor.”

But perhaps my true driving force on this topic was stated by a modern sage in a tweet: “I will never understand people’s fascination with their ancestry; isn’t knowing your current family bad enough?”