Big news! I'm heir to an oil fortune.

Last year, as a participant in a DNA test spearheaded by a distant Dryden relative, I swabbed the insides of both my cheeks (the ones above my waist, not below it) with giant Q-tips and mailed them off to a lab for analysis. The goal was to try and determine how far back the Dryden bloodline goes and what those of us who bear the name might possibly be in terms of our ethnicity – Peruvian, Ethiopian, Neanderthal, etc.

Turns out most of my fellow swabbees  – Drydens from the U.S., U.K., Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia – aren’t Drydens at all.

Back in the 1400s there was a valley outside Edinburgh, Scotland, known as Driden Wood. (Driden apparently means “Dry Valley” in Scottish.) The valley was owned by the Sinclair family. Some of their descendants may have used not only their last name but the place where they lived to distinguish themselves from the other Sinclairs in that part of the world. For instance, James Sinclair de Driden, LaToya Sinclair de Driden, Billy Bob Sinclair de Driden, etc. Over time, that name evolved into “Sinclair de Dryden” and, finally, plain old “Dryden.”

It may take some time to prove it definitively but I'm almost sure I'm an heir of Harry Ford Sinclair, founder of Sinclair Oil, America’s thirty-eighth largest independent company. (Full disclosure; Uncle Harry was implicated in the Teapot Dome Scandal and spent six months in prison for jury tampering but I for one appreciate the lengths he went to to protect my inheritance.)

Now I'm working to determine my connection to the Fords because Harry Ford Sinclair, it stands to reason, was related to Henry, so I'm probably entitled to a cut of the Ford Motor Company, too. 

After all these years my ship has come in.

Blood is at least as thick as oil, don’t you agree?