ION I have a car question. Yesterday I was informed that my timing chain is loose or stretched but was advised not to do anything about it. What might be the repercussions of that? Will I be okay to make a 9 hour drive in a couple of days?

My boss says that diagnosis is really suspect. A loose or stretched timing belt or chain is a very serious thing. He thinks if someone is dumb enough to tell you not to worry about it they might not know what they're talking about. You might want to consider taking the car someplace else.

If you get farther into this and want to dig into more detailed information, genealogy is one of the other things the internet is for other than porn and pictures of cats.

My owner's manual makes no mention of a timing belt, so I'm guessing that means it's a timing chain, right?

The SERVICE ENGINE SOON light has been going off and the diagnostic computer said the timing chain was bumping something to set it off.

My family managed to miss all the 20th century wars, mostly through the luck of being the wrong age for them. (E.g. my grandfathers were too young for WWI and too old for WWII.) My dad was in the army during the Korean War, but he was stationed in Germany, and my brother was in the army during the 1st Gulf War but was an instructor at West Point at the time. 19th and 21st centuries are a different story--my nephew did a tour in Iraq with his National Guard unit, and my great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier.

The non-American aspects of my family make it slightly harder to track down the ones I know little about, but it's a good place to start.

Yeah, being first generation on one side and second on the other, the Internet is not my friend when it comes to genealogy. Also, the fact that my Polish grandparents who came here died in the 1920s and 30s really doesn't help matters.

My owner's manual makes no mention of a timing belt, so I'm guessing that means it's a timing chain, right?

Cars switched from timing chains to belts a while ago. But now some newer cars have timing chains again. Is this your older Monte Carlo?

I'll ask my boss about the computer diagnostic thing when he comes back. I didn't know car computers could tell you that. (I've only owned one car made after 1984.)

I found a decent amount of Jamaican info, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to make the leaps back to the British Isles. I'm dizzy just thinking about it.

A sad certainty has just set in--I'm totally going to get back into genealogy at least for the duration of my father's birthday celebration. At the very least I have to unbreak what I broke yesterday (now there are parentless children wandering around the family tree).

It's a '98 Monte Carlo. I found a file of Timing Belt Replacement Recommendations (from 2005) which only lists Monte Carlo for the years '95-'97.

Oh, and it lists '96-'97 models as having interference engines. Hm.

My grandmother was HUGE into our family genealogy. She had boxes and boxes of birth, marriage, death certificates, military records, etc. She lucked out, though, when she cemented our direct connection to the Bamford family and was able to use The Bamford Saga [link] to go back even further into her family history.

She worked on my grandfather's side and also got pretty far on her husband's maternal side, but the paternal side stops in the early 1800's because my great-great grandfather was adopted in Germany and there are no records of his birth parents anywhere.

I know that there is DNA testing for African descendants to find out what region one has descended from. Do they have the same for other countries? Europe and the like?

My maternal grandfather enlisted in the Navy and was aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He said the hills looked like they were covered in snow, because the Japanese had tied white hankies to all of the guns embanked in the hills.

My paternal grandfather flew in WWII for the Navy. I don't know much more than that.

My dad served as a radio engineer for the Marines in Viet Nam. He signed up to avoid getting drafted, which made my grandfather disown him.

There's a couple old guys in my neighborhood who were taken to the internment camps (actually, now just one). I've bought them many a beer as they tell their stories. It is necessary to hear.