AMERICA! AMERICA!
Never once did The Bubba sigh and say to us, "Ah, The Shtetl, how I miss it;"
Safe and distant how we praise that s**thole from the perch of our joys illicit!
That poetry got me interested in doing some online research into the specifics of my family's origin. Turns out my family had been settled in England since the reign of King Athelstan (c.895–939). They had a timber castle, Castle Hylton (at times Hilton) and it was subsequently re-built in stone by Sir William Hylton between 1376 and 1435. This info, along with a lot more, is all available in Wikipedia, so you know it is accurate.
So, not exactly a Shtetl, but on the other hand, once one has a large enough number of offspring eventually the family outgrows even a nice suburban split level. So some of us wandered away from the old home place, and by the 1660s one guy in particular, had sailed to the New World and named an island after himself.
But between say, circa 900 and 1660-something I know very little of what went on. There were predations, wanderings, knavery, banishments, invasions and the usual things that go with that, which dovetails nicely with Chip's early post about Vikings and Saxons. My oldest brother always said I look like a Viking, all I needed was the hat, but alas, I never got the horned hat, nor a title to a castle or so much as a house on a golf course on our namesake island. Nope. I got doodly squat. Well, other than an attitude and a desire to go Viking, but I am mostly over the latter at this stage of my life.
This is what the castle looks like now - pretty hokey, when you get right down to it.
And this is a family picture from over 100 years ago. The distinguished gentleman with the long white beard is my great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, the man in the back seat of this photo studio touring car is my grandfather who died before I was born, and the little dude with his finger up his nose is my uncle - I knew him, used to hang around with him when he and his family lived in this country. He was a Foggy Bottom guy and spent years living in South America. One more tidbit - after he researched our family tree and discovered that we had descended from Capt. William Hilton, he retired to Hilton Head Island and lived out his days there. Oh, to be a wealthy government drone, eh? Okay, tidbit number two - I look so much like my GGF that it kind of freaks me out. But once again, I can't find a hat that looks like his.
