For decades, if not centuries, science has looked for the missing link between man and ape. Finding the missing links is something people have a strong need to engage in. Just look how popular genealogy has become.

Years ago I heard Johnny Carson talking about a relative of his who spent time in an English prison. If I correctly recall, the man had been a highwayman and Carson took great pride in knowing he had a bad seed in his family’s hay stack.

Over the years I envied Carson in that he had this tale to tell. During the past winter, however, I discovered that I too have a couple of criminals in my family past. If you go back into English history far enough you’ll find that on my father’s maternal side there were a couple of dudes who were members of the English nobility by virtue of having been lawyers. Certainly that gives me one up on Carson. Lawyers then, as now, are further down the criminal scale than common highwaymen.

This morning I discovered yet another link to infamy but this time it’s nothing a modern-day liberal Democrat can snuggle up to. I received an email from a woman in Germany containing an Ancestry.Com family tree that my maternal grandmother descended from. Sadly, way back in the early 1700s one of my great greats married in to a Baden, Germany family named Bachmann. It is now possible that I share DNA with Michelle’s Bachmann’s, I got my Doctorate through the mail and can cure you of your homosexuality, husband, Marcus.

Maybe this explains why my homemade cornmeal mush fell apart in the skillet.