Bartolomeu Rodrigues Clemente

Born December 1582

Bartolomeu Rodrigues Clemente, born December 1582, was my 14th great-grandfather. I can trace my father’s maternal line back to a tiny village in the Azores documented to 1582, 389 years ago.

Rumor the lineage was Sephardic Jews forced to flee to the Azores and convert during the Spanish Inquisition.

There is also an old story of a vague great great great great grandmother from Africa who was brought to that island my family is documented to have inhabited.

My scientific curiosity got the best of me years ago, and I naively took a National Geographic and 23 & Me test.

Nat geo showed 80%+ Irish, 20% Portuguese, 12% Ashkenazi, 5% Finnish, 2% African.

23 & Me showed 88% Northern European, 11% Spanish/Portuguese (Iberian), and 1% African.

I can trace my father’s maternal family line back almost 400 years, clear as day, yet I have no family.

For most of my memory, my father was obsessed with genealogy, but he treated his living daughters like shit.

Though I am not close to my mother's family, they were never as outright cruel or damaging as my father’s.

My mother’s mother I loved very much and felt she loved me.