Mom is into genealogy. I’m not. At least, I can say I’ve never shared her passion for uprooting our past ancestors and fitting them here and there into our family tree. There’s an interesting fact, though, that she shared with me that’s relative to our relatives and this DNA thing that cropped up in my life at age 28 causing a sudden loss of my central vision. She told me the 1850 census was the first to make notation of blind household members. Hmmm. You’d think somewhere in my maternal family tree there would be someone with a tic mark on the census record for blindness. According to Mom, it just isn’t there. This disease that takes my sight, Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, is passed on mitochondrial DNA from mothers to all offspring. It’s passed to me from her, and her mother, and her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, and on and on. It primarily affects males. Why me? A female? Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” I guess I came from one little defective acorn in our big family tree, but I’m gonna be a mighty oak!
#genealogy #LHON #lebershereditaryopticneuropathy #DNA #1850census
