globalized

Epp's cousin Mihkel invited me to www.geni.com and again I have become momentarily distracted by our family tree.

In the past I used to work on making my family tree taller -- that is tracing it back father. These days, though, I wish I knew less. Some people are into this 'stuff' for the dirt. I am not. The most 'dirty' things I found out were that my great-grandfather "Sam" was born "Salvatore" and that my other great-grandfather "Fred" was born "Alphonse."

Here's a curiosity from the tree. We have Norwegian ancestors. Thymen Jans Lymen and Martje Webber were from Flekkeroy, and island off the south coast of Norway, before they moved to New Amsterdam in the 1630s with the Dutch West Indies company. Their daughter, Anna Maria, married Cornelius Van Hoorn, who was born in Den Hoorn in the Netherlands. The family became Dutch. Their granddaughter, Catharina Van Hoorn, married Dublin-born John McEvers in New York in 1722. The family became Irish. After that the family sort of straddled the line between Irish and English for about a century before becoming Irish, and only Irish, again.

One day I tried to figure out all these diverse roots and then just gave up and decided that one half of me was "Mediterranean" and the other "northern European." But none of it really matters because, as far as I know, the family could be Surinamese in three generations. What I think is funny though is how we tend to think of 'globalization' as a new phenomenon. It seems like its been going on to various degrees over at least the past 400 years, when the Dutch opened trade posts from South America to Malaysia. After that, it snowballed. We're the living proof.