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Actor/director Ben Affleck was featured last year on an episode of "Finding Your Roots." The popular genealogy series explores the previously unknown ancestral roots of famous people.

Ben wasn't happy with everything the show discovered. Turns out one of his ancestors owned slaves. He insisted that this unattractive fact be cut from the show before it aired.

Given how much the show emphasized the Civil Rights activism of Ben's parents, perhaps being descended from slave owners was a bit too ironic.

I was disappointed. If a person really wants to know who they are, they should be willing to take the bad with the good. If only the good gets remembered, then a genealogy is at least half a lie simply by omission. Nobody's ancestry contains only bright lights.

I heard a lot about my family's amazing genealogy growing up, how we were descended from royalty, how we could tie our bloodline to LDS prophets, and how the world would be a much drearier place but for our historical contributions.

Hearing this as a child depressed the hell out of me. There wasn't a single robber, chicken thief, bastard, footpad, floozy or rogue in the bunch.

Everyone in our line was courageous, pious, humble, and relied on the strength of the Lord to preserve our bloodline and get us to Zion.

But if that was true, how did it explain me? Somewhere in our line had to be a mysterious adoption, a slip of a registrar's pen, or a drunken trollop who late one night took a wrong turn into a zoo.

Fortunately, the genealogy I heard was mostly bull$#@#. I later found out that my ancestors were just as bad as anyone else's. Yeah, we were related to European royalty, but it was through back stair assignations, inbred lechery, and brothels.

We had an LDS leader in our family, but it was by virtue of polygamy. My great-great-grandma was his fifth wife, bore him no children, and left him for our actual ancestor as soon as she could pick the lock on the barn.

If we contributed anything of note to the world it was that we were simple drudges incapable of screwing things up on a scale large enough that some of you might still hold a grudge about it. You're welcome.

This is not to say that I lack pride in my ancestors. In fact, I'm really interested in where I come from. So much so that I'm going back there.

My wife and I will celebrate our 40th (Pig Iron, I think it's called) Wedding Anniversary this year. To celebrate, we are returning to the old country — England — to track down the spirit of our ancestors.

Both of our ancestral families come from within a hundred miles of each other. Her great-great grandmother fled an abusive husband and immigrated to Canada with her infant son shortly before the first World War.

She remarried (presumably without the benefit of divorce) and began the long process that would result in the 1-year-old demon great-great-great-granddaughter pulling all the books off my shelves right now.

Mormons got my family in 1853. Ten years later they fled economic blight in England for greener pastures in Utah — where I suspect the pasture joke turned out to be entirely on them.

The Suffolk village my family left 152 years ago is still so small that the inhabitants probably do time shares on a dog. No shops. No churches. Just a half dozen houses on the edge of a marsh.

I don't know what I expect to find when I get there. If nothing else, maybe the where part can tell me more about the who I am part. I don't plan on being ashamed of any of it.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby