June 30th is the birthday of Elizabeth Ann Cusick Sullivan: daughter of Budd and June; sister of Katherine, Linda, Debra and Brian; mother of Rick and Maggie; stepmother of Jim, Mick and Mary, Amos and Sara, Miles and Sarah and Francie; grandmother of Rachel, Oscar, Beatrice, Georgia, Maeve, James, Silas, Marcos, Roman and Carmen; sister-in-law, aunt, cousin and friend to manu more lucky people. Everyone calls her Bitsy.
For over three decades, Bitsy worked in her true vocation as a grade school teacher and is now enjoying retirement knowing she helped shaped the minds and hearts of so many children. The world continues to benefit from her talents--her kindness, wisdom, work ethic, sense of humor, patience and intelligence--and her family and neighbors are continually blessed with her artistry in the garden. I've never seen such beautiful flower beds in real life!
She won the highest accolades from the Munster Garden Club who sponsors the annual Garden Walk—8 homes are chosen for hundreds of people to tour. The proceeds go to the high school and to training of the disabled for gardening. Bitsy got the yard just perfect and everybody said it was the best garden and yard they had ever seen—she’s a Master Gardener, registered in the state of Indiana, and is at the top of her game.
Bitsy is Jim's soulmate and his inspiration, and their life together is truly something to admire.
Happy Birthday, sweet Bitsy, and may you have 51 more healthy ones, by the Aunt Joannie Sullivan Law of Longevity Aspiration of 2008.
God bless us and save us and keep us from harm.
Love, Patty
Below is a little tale about Bitsy's ancestors, from Jim.
THE TALE OF BITSY'S ANCESTORS
We participated in the IBM/ national Geographic/ Waitt Family Foundation joint venture called Deep Ancestry. You can find it at www.nationalgeographic.com.I sent them the fee and they sent us three kits: one for my Y-chromosome, one for Fran's mitochondrial DNA, and one for Bitsy's mitochondrial DNA. Patty did this also, for her mitochondrial DNA. Here's what that means.
The baby gets a dad contribution, sperm, which is nothing but a DNA pack with a tail, much like most of us men. In there is the X or Y chromosome. Some sperms are X, some Y.
X make girls, Y make boys. To track a boy's DNA, they use the Y-chromosome he got from his father, so the heritage is father to father to father to father etc., ad infinitum ad nauseam.
The baby also gets, on the other hand, a mom contribution, the egg. Now the egg is a real cell, unlike the sperm which is just moving genetic material.
In this real cell is a nucleus, which has the sex chromosomes, always X. So everybody gets an X from their mother, girls get an X from their father, boys get a Y from their father.
But ALSO in this egg cell are mitochondria, little power plants, and they have their own DNA in them, called mitochondrial DNA (m-DNA). So every baby gets the m-DNA from the mother, with the egg, but boys don't pass it on because they don't pass on eggs, onlysperm. Girls DO pass the m-DNA on.
So, to track the lineage of girls, they track the m-DNA. Mother to mother to mother, etc.
The gene of TRUE relationship always comes from the mother. The Jews and the Spanish (our people) understood this a long, long time ago, somehow.
If you go to the website and plug in the code, given to us from the analysis and kept secret by the joint venture, you can see where our DNA came from after it left the original place where the ancestress of EVERY SINGLE HUMAN LIVING ON THE EARTH TODAY came from, the Olduvai gorge in East Africa, some 65,000 years ago.
By getting my Y-chromosome, I have the path of the genes of every single male whose father is named Sullivan in this clan. I also have the contribution of those males to their daughters, but those genes won't be as trackable.
By getting Patty's m-DNA, we have the path of every female descended from Boom Boom, and all their female descendants, etc., since her only children who lived were girls. We also got those mothers' contributions to their sons, that won't pass on. By getting Fran's I got the m-DNA that she and my sons got from their mother. There are many other chromosomes that could be tracked, admittedly, but that would be monumental, so they just go with Y and m-DNA.
Then we decided to check out Bitsy's and this is the astonishing result: her haplogroup left East Africa, went to the Sinai, split into branches. One went up to Kazakhstan and split. One of its branches went to the great steppes and split again. Bitsy's branch went into Siberia and split a fourth time. Bitsy's branch went to the western edge of China, in Genghis Khan's territory and split once more. Her split went north and east over the desert to the Bering Sea and split in its last mutation. Her branch of that mutation, or split, entered North America and migrated south and east and made its way to the foot of Lake Michigan!
Bitsy is an Indian, and before that she was Chinese and before that Mongol, then Russian, etc.
All the way back, we were all, each and every single one of us, BLACK! Blackie is the purest of us all. It's the God's-honest scientific truth. Ancestral Eve, from Olduvai, 65,000 years ago-we have her bones- has the gene possessed by every single living human being in the entire world!
If the implications of that ever really sink in, there are a lot of incredible things that could happen.
By the way, our Y chromosome's last stop is in northwest Spain, just as Lefty and his ancestors claimed. That haplogroup has migrated to three places: southwest Ireland (the Beare peninsula), Normandy, and Wales. Our genes are the same as 90 percent of the men in southwest Ireland and the 90 percent of the men in the northwest corner of Spain.
Bitsy's haplogroup's last mutation was at the foot of Lake Michigan. The chromosome has not mutated yet since then. That was about 8000 BC. So how did she get to be a cute little Irish chick?
Here's what we pieced together: The French explorers, probably Normans, were over here going up and down the rivers in the 1600's. Father Marquette, Louis Joliet, LaSalle, they were the kingpins. They discovered and navigated the Chicago, the Calumet, the DesPlaines, the Illinois, the Mississippi rivers, paving the way for Iberville and Bienville to get all the way down to New Orleans. They had big parties of soldiers and voyageurs with them.
There was a beautiful Potowatomi, or Fox, or Sauk Indian lass from around here at the foot of Lake Michigan someplace- becauseour neighborhood right here is the old Indian stomping grounds-and a voyageur fell in love with her, persuading her to come back to France with him when they returned home. They were all Catholics and had the Jesuits with them-Marquette was a Jesuit- and the Jebbies would have made the men marry their women instead of just scooping them up. So this beautiful Indian maid, with gorgeous legs, goes back to Normandy, maybe to the village of de Cussac, where the Cusick's are from. The voyageur who married her was maybe named Doe. They had babies who married French people and ten generations went by, the Indian m-DNA going from mother to mother to mother until one of the (by now thoroughly French with the Indian forgotten and submerged in all the French genes) mothers immigrates to Paris, Illinois. And in the 1920's a cute little girl named June Doe is born, meets a soldier named Edgar Allen "Budd" Cusick ( whose ancestors came from de Cussac, were Norman knights who invaded England, and four generations later were sent to Ireland with the Fitzgeralds where they became the Cusack's, and the name morphed in Ireland to Cusick, then they immigrated to Paris Illinois in the 1830's) and the two of them have an ostensible Irish-French American baby girl named Bitsy, who is actually an Asian femme de la reve, and a Fox Indian.
Now, when Bitsy sees an Indian, she points and says, "My people."
The website explains this in wonderful depth. It is moving and beautiful. We found all this out by following an ad for Deep Ancestry in the Chicago Tribune. The data base is growing daily.
The science above is true. It is valid and well documented.
My story.... well.... it's a good story and I'm sticking to it. I learned that from my parliamentary brother John and my journalistic brother Blackie, and my politically astute brother Mike, and my dramatically trained brother Matt.
It's a family story, and may contain the Voice of the Ancestors. I'll have to check with Gus.
But Bitsy is my Irish Indian babe. And, thanks be to God, she is safe. Happy Birthday, Honey. I love you.
God bless us and keep us and save us from harm.
Love,
Seamus the Older
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