Since retirement three years ago, it’s been fun to dabble in genealogy on Ancestry.com.

Our family tree, at this point, looks much wider than tall. Geez, there were some huge families just a few generations back!

The DNA tests that Farmer Gary and I took some years ago involved spitting into small tubes and mailing them off to Ancestry. My saliva was bubbly while Gary’s was flat. (I still wonder what that means.)

Every so often, Ancestry emails with the grand announcement that: Although DNA does not change, their technology does. And so, the refined breakdown of where our families are from ebbs and flows a bit.

Maybe Ancestry doesn’t usually get a very good “open rate” when they send these notifications. It seems like they’re trying to move that needle. … because this latest email included the teaser that one of my ethnicities had shifted, from four percent to 17 percent.

Great Scott!

Aye, so it appears, lads and lassies: more than a wee bit of my blood is from Scotland.

What must surely be dismissed as a coincidence, a few days before receiving the notice, an ad for “WeeBox” appeared in my Facebook feed. It’s a monthly box of “discoveries” from the highlands and the lowlands of Scotland. (Seeing as how the Irish version of this included cow-themed taffy that de-crowned me twice in one day, I think I’ll pass.)

At first, 17 percent seemed a bit of a shock. But after giving it some thought, I guess the clues were there all along:

• Dad and his Bagpipe Record
  I’ve mentioned before about Dad and his wicked use of bagpipe music to wake us up on Saturday mornings. He would blast it on the stereo until, bleary-eyed, we’d scuff our way down to the breakfast table. It was torture, I tell you. Torture!

• A favorite photo
  There’s a photo album from Mom and Dad’s that contains a collection of their favorite pictures of relatives, including this one. With Harry‘s permission, here’s a 2007 photo which he guesses is from one of his and Linda‘s trip to Cape Breton Island. Crivvens! Cape Breton is part of Nova Scotia, one of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. Nova Scotia is Latin for “New Scotland.”

• James Doohan
  Scotty was my favorite character in the original Star Trek series. Even as a child, I had a thing for engineers. (Doohan, who survived the D-Day invasion of Normandy, was of Irish blood and was a Canadian actor, as were Spock and Kirk.)

Here’s a classic exchange between Montgomery Scott and Mr. Spock:

• “Nessie”
  Gary has a cousin by the name of Sylvester who goes by “Nessie.” Not named after the Loch Ness Monster, mind you, but still. We have a small collection of Nessies in our house.

• Favorite Shakespeare tragedy
  Macbeth: The story of the fallout of ruthless political ambition in Scotland. So good, even Ray Bradbury quoted from it: “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

• Authors from Scotland
  Dad and Mom kindly gave us their library of Folio Society books. Authors from Scotland abound, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Josephine Tey, and Robert Louis Stevenson. With a new month starting soon, perhaps I’ll read only books penned by Scottish authors.

• The kilt
  John, as a teen, asked to be gifted a kilt. (I think this was after watching Braveheart several times.) For some reason, we got him a beach towel with a kilt design on it and a set of bagpipes one year for Christmas, but no actual kilt. I guess it’s time for an update regarding the lad’s love of traditional Scottish garb as the holidays approach.

Well, as you take the high road and I take the low road, let’s end with this cheery Scottish proverb:

“Be happy while you’re living, For you’re a long time dead.”

~ Scottish Proverb

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