There's a saying that goes, "There are two things you can give your children: one is roots and the other is wings."
But for many of us, our roots in this country don't go very deep.
Except for members of the First Nations community, our bloodlines all hail from elsewhere in the world. And these days, it's more uncommon to find someone born here who is all one ethnic background than it is to find someone with five or six different cultures mixing in their bloodstreams.
That's what, in part, makes so many of us feel Canadian - our different backgrounds give us something in common.
I never thought anything of the fact that my ancestors came from three different places on the globe. I was no different than anyone else in my community, growing up. But just this year, I realized how much of my family story has been lost over the generations since my ancestors all moved to Canada.
While the basics of how and when my Icelandic great-grandparents came to Saskatchewan was recorded by my grandfather in our local history book, some of the specifics fell through the cracks. One of those was the town near where my great-grandparents had lived in Iceland; another, the names of their brothers and sisters who didn't come to Canada. If it was not for our relatives in Iceland looking for us, knowing more about us than we knew about them, we would still be in the dark, knowing only that they came from the north, and one side of the family had suffered some heavy losses in a typhoid epidemic.
I don't know why we lost the answers to these questions in the first place. It's not like I never knew my grandfather. I guess I just never thought of asking him these things until it was too late, and he was gone.
I know my family isn't the only one who has little to no idea of the details of their ancestors' lives in another country. A friend of mine was recently informed she was completely wrong about her family's genetic background, fooled by the languages her grandparents spoke to each other. Though they spoke fluent Ukrainian and French, they were neither, it turns out.
Her family didn't keep that a secret, the subject just never came up.
It was the same with my family. It's not that my grandfather was purposely keeping details from us. He just didn't talk about them.
We are infinitely lucky that the Icelanders are obsessive about keeping track of Icelandic families, even after they move away, and that our relatives wanted to find us. Otherwise, we would still be in the dark, and would have missed knowing some pretty great people.
Getting to know them is what really pointed out the cracks in our knowledge of our family. They can trace their lines back centuries, unhindered by names changed by immigration officials, or poorly kept pioneer records. It's easy to find out who their great-great-great-great grandmother was, how many children she had, where she was born - on and on and on.
Their roots are deep into the soil where they still live.
In comparison, my family's roots in Canada are still relatively shallow. But I feel like they've gotten deeper, the more I know about those who decided to come here, and who they left behind. It's made me, oddly, feel more Canadian than I ever have, to find out more about these Icelanders, as well as the Englishmen and Scotsmen who form part of my background.
While parts of me carry the imprint of these three cultures, that all three of them are in me is what makes me, no doubt, Canadian.
