I know so little about my heritage

[Samus Aran]

My grandma actually studies our family's genealogy a lot. There's a lot there, but I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to it.

Off the top of my head, I remember a few interesting things. For one thing, we're definitely a Mayflower family - our heritage has been tracked back to a settler coming over on the Mayflower from England. So yeah, there's the English in us.

Much of our heritage is in a family name called "Ricketts," which is no longer in the family, so the last one of them must have been a woman who married and then that name was dead from then on.

One particular Ricketts man of interest was Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist in the Monterey Bay area of California who was a close friend of John Steinbeck. He's the basis for the character of Doc in Steinbeck's excellent novel Cannery Row. The book's even dedicated to him. And he was a pretty important guy in marine biology at the time...his lab is still on Cannery Row, by the way.

That's about all I remember. The Ricketts side came from England and then stayed here. They were spread out pretty much all over the country eventually.

All I know about my Dad's side, where my last name comes from, is that it's largely Irish.