안녕하세요! Exploring a Previously-Unknown Heritage

안녕하세요! (Hello!)

I have always found genealogy rather intriguing, as one can discover their roots and see how their family has progressed throughout epochs of human history. While most of us know stories/histories about our parents, grandparents, and possibly even great-grandparents, how often do we research beyond that? With all of our responsibilities and obligations that fill our lives, it is often difficult to dedicate sufficient time to research the various lineages one might have. For the longest time, I had always considered myself to be of Scandinavian and Eastern European descent, as I am of Polish, German, and Danish descent on my father’s side and of Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian descent on my mother’s side. For years, we never really considered that there were other lineages of which we were a part because it seemed that all of the stories/histories that we could amass from both sides came from the these regions. Interestingly enough, we received quite the shock on my mother’s side of the family about five years ago.

I can still remember getting the phone call from my mother when I was just getting out of school that one day back in April of 2010. She hurriedly told me about my uncle’s checkup at the cardiologist, which was not a surprise, as heart disease runs rampant on my mother’s side of the family. Expecting to hear the worst, I asked what the diagnosis was. What she said happened to be one of the biggest shocks of my life. The condition that he has is not harmful at all, but rather, a surprising “missing piece of the puzzle” to our genealogy. Allegedly, it was an extremely rare condition that had, up until this point, only been found in medical records from Koreans living on the Korean peninsula. What we thought was a hermetic seal on the family lineage got popped off in an instant. I was absolutely befuddled to hear that, as it seemed so unbelievable, but ever since then, I have yearned to find out more about this lost lineage.

Due to the lack of information (at the present time) about our Korean lineage, we cannot really say for sure which part of Korea our family has placed roots, who our ancestors were, or how it even fits into the equation. I wanted to find some way to incorporate that new lineage into my life, so I decided to learn more about the history of Korea, study the culture, and even take up learning the Korean language.

Having studied three other languages (French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese), language learning has become an integral part of my personal and academic identities. Over this past summer, I decided that I was going to try to teach myself Korean to not only expand my current range of languages, but to also find a part of myself that was previously unknown. The adventure has been rather shaky, as this summer proved to be chaotic, which has stymied (somewhat) my learning of Korean. Still, considering the time I have put into this project, I feel as though I have a better grasp of how to read, write, and speak in Korean. Obviously, I still have much more to learn, but even with this limited knowledge, I feel a deeper sense of identity, which oftentimes, we take for granted.

At this moment, thinking about how I want to progress with this blog, I’ve thought about experimenting with a mix of recording my progress with learning Korean and including pieces about various histories of Korea, current events, culture, etc. So, I suppose it’ll be an informative and (hopefully) intriguing adventure for all of you who will take the time to follow my blog. As it is getting late now, I will say 감사합니다  and 안녕히 주무세요!