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By Root 1130 0

the mother and father. This rarefied fluid originated in the heart and was carried by semen, a substance thought to be contributed by both sexes. This feeds into the emotionally satisfying idea that bloodlines are blood-made, ceaseless crimson tributaries reaching back thousands of generations. Even in the intimacy of the womb, however, circulatory systems are independent; blood does not cross over from mother to child. It is genetics that trickle down generation to generation, determining everything from hair color to blood type to a predisposition for certain illnesses. That’s all well and good, but cold. The fact that I share DNA with my great-grandfather William, for whom I was named, does not have the same ring as hearing that we share the same Irish blood. Blood is tactile, warm, we are bathed in it at birth, whereas a spiral of DNA is clinical, invisible to the naked eye, the proof of something denied—a suspect’s guilt, or paternity.

What we commonly learn as children is that we’re part of a family tree, each of us related to a number of great-great-long-dead people through a lattice of births and marriages. Steve’s parents have spent the last several years digging into his family’s roots, a project they’ve pursued with a degree of passion that might even make them honorary Mormons. Six months ago Millie and Ted sent us the product of their detective work, a computer disk with records accounting for six generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Where I thought the screen would sprout in a grand visual, all branches and leaves, instead a single name popped up, the current youngest member of the Byrne clan. By entering a number command, we could advance person by person, jumping back limb to limb, just a generation at a time. Once we got to Steve, we found me, listed as his partner. I should not have been so surprised to be included; his folks have always treated me like another son.

The program Ted had whipped up was deliberately simple; it boiled down lives to beginning and end dates with occasional footnotes—so-and-so had died of such-and-such, for example, or this cluster of family had immigrated from thereabouts to hereabouts at around this time. We poked around for other bits of information. We scanned the various branches for those births that had oops written all over them—the “Irish twins” born less than a year apart, the consecutive siblings separated by a decade or more. Steve and I also gave his family tree the gay inspection, looking for the curiously unwed, those “confirmed bachelors” and bachelorettes who might have had secret lives, secret families. Steve proudly pointed out several individuals around whom lavender suspicions had arisen. As we headed back in time, it did my heart good to see that so many of his ancestors had lived to ripe old ages, ninety and more. That he has such genetics can only help. Going through the document was continually unnerving in one respect, however. Between entering a command and the results appearing, the screen would go black, a disconcerting two-beat delay during which my mind would speed to worst-case scenarios: The program had been corrupted, a whole generation deleted.

The closest thing I have to a family tree is a collection of old address books, each one documenting a period of my life over the past two decades. They contain not just names but evocations of places, households—and also of the swath cut by AIDS. They are pieces of evidence, books I could never part with—proof of lives made, of family created then wiped away.

Of course, it’s a rare person nowadays whose family fits into a perfectly traditional structure. Most of us have something less like a single tree and more like a “family orchard,” a concept introduced by adoption educator Joyce Maguire Pavao. Whether you are adopted or a foster child or come from a blended home of multiple marriages—no matter how unconventional your household may be—Pavao’s model acknowledges that your true family is often tied not just by blood or law but by circumstance and choice as well. It is this orchard that nurtures,