This is my life

So, I love my parents and my whole immediate family (roughly a third of which isn't legally related to me, and none of whom are blood related to me). I was adopted when I was six weeks old, and I have never really had that nagging 'who are my biological parents?' sort of feeling. I never really had a need to look for my birth mother, or find out more about my heritage or medical history. I figured with a blank slate I could make my own way; I place great value in being self-determined.

Every once in a while, though, I see something that makes me wistful. I just saw an ancestry.com ad, and it made me realize that I will never know where I came from. I won't know if my ancestors were sheepherders or businesspeople or royalty. I'll never be able to trace my lineage back to one of Columbus's ships or be a member of the DAR or do any of that stuff that so many people seem interested in.

It doesn't make me sad, because I don't feel like someone's ancestry has that much bearing on who they are (at least in America; except for old money (which I suppose we do have a fair amount of)). Tangent: My personal belief is that who you are is less determined by who your ancestors were and more by the environment you were raised in and a fair amount of genetic hand-me-downs (the strangest things, too, like music sense, sense of humor and ways of handling stress). I believe this because my younger sister (also adopted) has met her biological mother and all of those things come from her biological parents (and were unlike anyone else in our family, so that only made sense). /Tangent

So anyway, it doesn't make me sad, but it does make me wistful because I appreciate the value of history, of knowing what came before. I'd like to be able to trace my family tree and see how far back I could get. I don't have any reason to do that for my actual family because it doesn't feel like it's mine to do, if that makes sense. I am of this family, but I am not of this ancestry. That makes me wistful too, even though I believe the families we make are just as valuable (if not more) than those we are born of. Still, it's a hole in my life, one of many from my adoption that I can never fill. I don't think about them much but every once in a while, one blindsides me.