January 2011

The Jornada Del Muerto, the Dead Man’s Trail, a waterless seventy-five-mile stretch of alkaline desert in southern New Mexico north of Alamogordo, was named in an age when transportation depended on water and grass, rather than refined hydrocarbons. In secrecy, in the spring of 1945, the last year of the Second World War, dedicated and determined men moved equipment into that emptiness to prepare to conduct the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.

I moved to Portland four years ago for a simple reason: After years of living and working in New York City, I was suddenly tired of the incessant noise. Portland seemed to offer me, a nature-loving city person, the best of both worlds. It has the ocean at its doorstep and forests, lakes, mountains, and rolling farmland in its back yard. It’s a city made for walking, with residential neighborhoods downtown. Portland is still small enough that people nod hello on the street, yet its residents come from all over the world.

Though Nieuw Amsterdam became English New York in 1664, the Dutch language survived into the late eighteenth century in northern New Jersey and southern New York. In obscure nooks of the Hudson Valley, Dutch lingered even into the twentieth century. From cookie ( koekje ) to noodle ( noodlefe ), the Dutch influence persists. Here are a few examples of how Dutch has made its way into everyday spoken English.

Brooklyn From the Dutch town Breukelen, meaning broken valley or land of brooks and marshes.

We are well-weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land,” wrote John Robinson and William Brewster in 1617. They were negotiating a land grant in the New World with England’s Plymouth Company, for their followers, the Pilgrims. The strange and hard land they spoke of was Holland, where the Pilgrims were living.

We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land,” wrote John Robinson and William Brewster in 1617. They were negotiating a land grant in the New World with England’s Plymouth Company, for their followers, the Pilgrims. The strange and hard land they spoke of was Holland, where the Pilgrims were living.

IN HIS ARTICLE “WHEN THE LAWS WERE Silent” (October), Chief Justice William Rehnquist omits a fact that puts the men responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II in an even less favorable light.

The case made by the administration at the time was based on military security. This might appear reasonable unless one looks at the treatment of the issei and nisei in the Hawaiian Islands, where the danger of attack was much greater. Hawaiian issei and nisei, with a few exceptions, were not relocated or put in internment camps. It was decided that the economy of the Hawaiian Islands would virtually collapse if the Japanese were relocated and interned, so they remained in their homes and at their jobs throughout the war, while those on the West Coast lost their homes and businesses.

SOME LEADING LIBRARIES

Allen County Public Library Historical Genealogy Department, 900 Webster Street, Fort Wayne, IN 46802/219-421-1200

www.acpl.lib.in.us/genealogy/

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Family History Library, 35 North West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84150/1-800-346-6044

Family History Centers worldwide

www.familysearch.org/

Houston Public Library
Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research, 5300 Caroline Street, Houston, TX 77004-6896 / 713-284-1999

The Library of Congress
Local History & Genealogy Reading Room, Humanities & Social Sciences Division, Thomas Jefferson Building, Room LJ G42, Washington, DC 20540-4660 / 202-707-6400

http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/genealogy

The most intimate of history is connected to the grandest. When you think of genealogy and your own family’s history, you can’t help but think of the events that shaped the lives of all our ancestors: war, religion, and, above all, technological change. Technology fueled the endless migrations of the last centuries, atomizing communities and even families. And now technology is bringing rhem, living and dead, back together again.

During the last several decades the popularity of genealogical research has grown with the rise of new tools. Through this growth many who became separated from their families, and thus their family histories, have discovered that they can find themselves reunited with long-lost cousins and long-forgotten lore. These reunions tend to foster pride in who we are and who we once were—which is, at bottom, why people become interested in tracing their family histories in the first place. But in the beginning genealogy belonged to a relative few, most of them rich.

I can remember to this day the first time that my brother and I went to the graveyard at Monticello. Our parents and grandparents had taken us down to Charlottesville for a meeting of the Monticello Association, the family organization of the descendants of Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters, Maria and Martha. The association owns and maintains the graveyard at Monticello and meets yearly to go over family business and pay its respects to Mr. Jefferson. There is a longstanding tradition that the youngest members lay the wreath upon the obelisk that marks the grave of our sixth great-grandfather. Somewhere in a box high on a shelf in a closet upstairs is a photograph of my brother, Frank, and me, decked out in our Sunday best shorts and open-collar shirts, approaching the grave, carrying the wreath between us. I must have been about five, and Frank about three. The black-and-white photograph reflects an innocent, blissful time in our lives.