Jörmungandr

 Ok, today was pretty dang fun! We went to the Lagoon amusement park in Farmington, UT. I had read on the website that they had a collection of "Little arms" and so, I joked about it with my children: I did not know where the heads or even the feet, but I tried to spread the excitement about possibly seeing a collection of arms, Mary being the smarty pants asked when I was excited about early firearms. I had to explain my joke a bit more as we entered "Pioneer Village" where we had so much fun on "Rattlesnake Rapids". It was one of those circular raft type rides that pretty much is certain to drench you...we were not let down, in fact, as we were exiting I overheard two passerby guys comment, "Did you see how drenched that lady was?" I didn't even get positioned under the waterfall! we rode several other rides to dry off. One, I told my son was the Jörmungandr , it is officially named "Colossus the Fire Dragon". 

The previous night, I had been telling my son fun little stories and he asked if I knew the one about the Jörmungandr, and I actually didn't so I looked it up, and it was fresh on my mind when I saw this crazy snaking loop to loop ride. I kept thinking about how much more sense a movie I had watched several times called "Ragnarok" made so I watched it, I tried to work on making a tablecloth, but because I do not understand much Norwegian I need to watch subtitles, or at least I did, now, I enjoy just listening. I figure I will learn more that way anyhow, which is a desire...While I was in that Norse thought loop, I thought again about my strange DNA results compared to my cousins, and sister. Mostly about the things I did not know, or knew only what paper trails told me. Anna Maria Anderson was born in Göteborg, Sweden. This was simply a fact, and I do not even recall how I determined that she was born while her parents lived in Sweden, but that they were both born in Norway, but I had figured that, end of story.... but, such a huge little thing actually has major ramifications. One website interpreted my DNA results to be largely Scandinavian, but my sister wasn't and then another one said my sister was actually Scandinavian, but I was not.. huh? ok, that's wierd, but I just got to thinking of explanations and figured it was due to a bias on the one site due to my family tree. The next hiccup was that my cousins  who were equally descended from this woman were 0% Scandinavian. This seemed very odd to me, because, as far as I knew neither had a large family tree so it could not be biased. I thought, hmm... well, I guess what we inherit is so miniscule maybe it does not actually show up. Then, another site which did not interpret what it meant, but nearly listed SNPS of matching DNA, and My cousins matched the right amount to make them first cousins, even with the strange results, so I wondered if the Scandinavian matches (a lot of them are Icelandic) are on my mother's side. So, putting the tree aside, I looked up shared ethnicities  and as I triangulated, I had far more Scandinavian matches on my father's side, but when I compared just the DNA, my closeness did not match the relationships suggested by my family tree. 

My father's mother had been adopted and so I figured the black horse was somewhere on that bloodline, and I did find a few oddities that I constantly reminded myself did not truly matter, but now, I am thinking that perhaps the real mystery is in the woman who's name and papers tell one story, but might not be true. I wouldn't know, no one could. We simply are left to believe what we read, or are we?

I have often heard people mention the significance of having multiple witnesses even a friend of mine with the last name of Anderson, told me that her husband's father's family simply adopted the name when seeking to hide. Well, could there be other cases of purposefully altered identities? Further with years passing such things are less likely to be knowable or have multiple matching witnesses, ultimately, I return to  "Colossus the Fire Dragon" or as I called it: Jörmungandr . Regardless, what a thing is called (communicated to be) it is still what it is.