
For Ron Trompke, family is everything.
In fact...If you broach the topic on any one of his five kids you better have a good ear and about 20 minutes.
Between his large brood, plenty of high school sports, a profitable Boise business and a beautiful wife to keep happy he has more than most men could dream of, but a few unanswered questions remain.
"It's a strange thought when you go through life that you will never known one aunt, uncle, parent whether you have siblings. A simple time where you'll never have heard your mother or your dad say I love you or I'm proud of you," says Ron.
He was adopted, left on the steps of an orphanage in Seoul, South Korea when he was a baby.
While his children look up to him and know all of his little idiosyncrasies he doesn't know even the names of his parents, their history, his history, which is partially why he turned to the National Geographic's "Genographic Project" for answers.
Where Ron hit a brick wall Dr. Spencer Wells offered the tools to tear it down.
Wells says the project, "...fills in the gaps on your ancient histories. We all have a sense of our genealogical history who our parents and our grandparents were so we can trace it back quite far but at some point everybody hits a brick wall."
The project aims to trace your families trail over time.
All it takes is a quick mouth swab and scientists can pinpoint where your family's been through the great events in recorded history, essentially, all the way back to the beginning of our species.
While Ron wasn't given the names and locations of his parents he did learn that while his mother was most likely Korean his father appears to have been Chinese.
His DNA sample will now be added to the hundreds of thousands from all over the world that Dr. Wells and his team of scientists are using to piece together the history of our species.
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