When I was in my early teens, I saw a map with family names in some places. One of them was "Kirby" and that got me interested in my ancestors. For a while, the National Geographic Society ran the Genographic Project that helped people understand the paths ancestors had taken out of Africa to their present location. Later, we had our DNA analyzed by 23andMe. We bought books of the results and Lynn's book has twice the ancestors that mine have. She has strong Viking and Nordic but also strong Hispanic and Native American. I'm just Germanic and Nordic in various subgroups and flavors. I really like the book The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending but there are many other good ones, too. I like to shorten the list by just citing blue-green algae and cockroaches as my ancestors.
