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I love where I live in Alaska, and I don’t want to move.

But when I first moved there from California 30 some years ago, I never expected to stay. It was just a stop on the way to a place that might be a little bit better – the place where I’d eventually choose to live.

Many of the people I’ve talked to, especially in the western U.S., tell me a very similar story. They never expected to end up where they are – but something happened and they did.

Genetic scientists can now trace this very human compulsion to want to move to a self-perceived better place fairly accurately by examining an individual’s DNA.

They do so by comparing shared population markers in the DNA and mapping where those populations used to live. Ultimately the ancestral trail of everyone alive today leads back to Africa, where the human family began a great migration north some 60,000 years ago.

Over the past decade, cartographers with the National Geographic Society have drawn up a  “genographic map” that shows the migratory paths different populations followed as they moved out of Africa, first to a great crossroads. Some turned east and populated India, Australia and Asia, including some who eventually crossed the land bridge into America. Others turned west and populated Europe, or at least the southern portion that wasn’t covered in ice at the time. And over the last millenia, some of those “westerners” have crossed the Atlantic and populated America too.

It’s much more complicated (and interesting) than that, of course, and the gene map (https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html)makes the human homeland in North Africa look a little bit like a spaghetti machine, extruding separate strands of human pasta all over the world.

But for about $100 you can buy a little cheek-swab kit from the Genographic Project, capture some of your DNA in a vial, mail it back and receive in return an analysis of what paths out of Africa your own maternal and paternal lines followed.

My brother in Alaska did that, first requesting a record of our paternal lineage. After a couple months, the analysis he received back in the mail showed that our father’s paternal ancestors followed a well-worn path out of Africa — one that ultimately veered to the west toward southern Europe, where they arrived between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, about the time that their distant hominid cousins, the Neanderthals (who’d lived there longer), were finally dying out as a species.

The genetic trail becomes a lot less distinct between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, when populations mixed more and easier modes of transportation confused the picture. But genographers are able to say that a high percentage of the male population of northern Ireland resembles our own genetic lineage.

This agreed with what we already knew from family records and a bit of my brother’s conventional geneological research. Our line of Brysons had previously resided near the borderland between County Donegal and County Derry in northern Ireland. We must have been content there for a good long while.

But the great potato famine of 1840 changed that. Because the last five generations of Brysons (from my great-great-grandfather to me) have been engaged in a near-continuous westward migration — from Ireland to New England to Colorado to California to Alaska, where my wife and I have raised three daughters.

But now that our girls are fully grown, we can’t help but wonder: Where will they choose to live? It’s not likely they would end up anywhere further west than we did and still remain in the continental United States. And there is a distinct possibility they could end up back East, where all three either attended or are still attending college.

Thinking about this I sometimes picture the long terrestrial tide of American migrants flowing westward like an ocean swell, rising as a wave rises when it reaches California — cresting in Oregon, Washington, Alaska — and now ebbing back on itself, rushing back eastward.

So whenever I get a a chance to travel, I’m curious to look around for other “good places to live” — at least for the benefit of others who might still be looking.

I see places like Port Townsend, or Coeur d’Alene, or Bozeman, or Cody, or Fort Collins, or Iowa City, or Madison, or Ann Arbor, or Buffalo, or Montpelier, or Portland, Maine — or Anchorage — and I make a little mental note. Not bad, I think. Not a bad place to live.

Montreal, Quebec, in Canada (with my daughter Katie this week, on a brief road trip to a small French-Canadian bakery in search of the world's best bagels)