Though it has taken nearly a year, a resolution is finally within reach after last year’s shocking news that my birth family is not Irish.

Readers may recall my column here just before St. Patrick’s Day 2022 about my sister Nancy’s jarring discovery that the heritage we had been claiming, celebrating, and actualizing with our beliefs and practices for the previous 50 years, was, allegedly, a big fat lie (“

Lies, All Lies, But Still St. Patrick’s Day

,” March 10, 2022). Scientists at Ancestry.com broke the news to Sis that there wasn’t a single chromosomal strand of Irish in her DNA.

Understandably, my seven siblings succumbed to various states of pique and dissension. Kevin questioned Ancestry’s accuracy. James questioned our parentage. Kenneth questioned Nancy’s reason for getting tested. And they all questioned my reason for blabbing it to the world.

OK, maybe not quite the world, but a whole bunch of people in places where the story was printed, from the News Tribune to the Chicago Tribune and Pittsburgh Gazette, among others.

Emails poured in from all over. Readers commiserated, corroborated, or thought I was joking. (Would I?) The messages fell into one of three categories: readers with stories of their own DNA test nightmares; readers venturing hypotheticals for our family’s mistaken lineage, such as a secret adoption in a branch of the family tree; and readers assuring me the Irish “spirit” is what’s important,…