Three New Learnings – Letter P

There are always new things to learn. Here are three that I learned in the last week or so – all beginning with the letter P.

Papiamentu

This past week I published my 15^th book. This one is titled “Introdukshon di e Bukinan

di Tèstamènt Bieu” (translated – Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament). It is written in the Papiamentu language. I had never heard of this language until recently and was told that it is the native language of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao – the ABC islands off the northern coast of Venezuela. I then looked up Papiamentu in the dictionary (e.g. Wikipedia) where it is called a Portuguese Creole language. This was a bit confusing to me at first, as the only languages I knew which had the Creole designation were the Louisiana Creole language that is spoken only by a few thousand people in that US state and the Haitian Creole language which is also French based and is spoken by over 12 million people.

But it turns out that I had some learning to do. According to Wikipedia, “A creole language is a stable natural language developed from a mixture of different languages.” There are examples of English-based Creole, Spanish-based Creole, French-based Creole, Portuguese-based Creole and others. Papiamentu is derived from Portuguese and African, with influences of English, Dutch, and Spanish. It is spoken by roughly 250,000 people in the ABC islands.

So not only did I learn about Papiamentu, but I had to correct what I thought I knew about Creole!

Peebles

I will often do some ad-hoc research on ancestry.com. One that I did recently was in order to see if there was a connection between our former neighbors (for 25 years) across the street whose house we recently purchased for my daughter to live in. Her maiden name was Peebles. But this was the same last name (and a somewhat unusual one) of an ex-husband of my wife’s cousin in Michigan.

After tracing the family line back for both these two people I found that they did indeed have a common ancestor, namely William Peebles who was born to a man of the same name who emigrated from the United Kingdom in the late 1600s to Prince Georges County, Virginia. So our neighbor is the 7^th cousin (once removed) of the ex-husband of my wife’s 1^st cousin (once removed). While this is not a close connection, the fact that I could document a connection between our former neighbor and my wife’s cousin is pretty interesting to me. One of the family lines stayed in Virginia until recently and then migrated to PA, the other moved from VA to TN to AL to MI.

For those who have shopped at it, there is also a Peebles Department Store chain with its headquarters in Virginia whose founder is also a descendant of the same William Peebles.

It’s always interesting to me to discover connections such as this through my genealogical research.

Polish Jews

A few days ago I watched an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are.” This is the UK version, not the US version of the same name. The episode I watched was about Jane Seymour because that was the only episode that season that starred an individual I knew (because she had appeared on American television). One of the things that I like about the UK version is that television there is not loaded with commercials like US TV shows, so a one-hour show is 57-59 minutes long instead of the 40 or so minutes of a one-hour US show.

The UK version is also not sponsored by ancestry.com, so instead of using technology to look up records they concentrate on showing the original records from churches, town libraries, and other sources as the person being highlighted is traveling around from place to place. Thus you get a bit more of the real history as you see the places involved.

In the case of Jane Seymour, she was trying to find more information about her father’s family who were from Poland in the mid-1900s. The first part of the investigation was in Warsaw which is where the family was from. They not only visited the places where her family was from, but showed old photographs of the life of Polish Jews during WWII when few Jews from Poland survived the Nazis – initially through imprisonment in the Warsaw ghetto and later through the concentration camps where all Jews were being sent.

According to my DNA analysis (via ancestry.com), 20% of my DNA is of Eastern European Jew origin (centered on Poland), so this background of Jane Seymour is a big piece of my heritage as well. My Jewish ancestry is through my paternal grandmother – her maiden name was Vera Levy. She was born in Brooklyn, NY, and lived in a series of tenement houses surrounded by other immigrant families – from England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and other countries.

My grandmother’s great-grandfather, Lewis Levy, had immigrated to NY in 1851 from a suburb of London, England. But it appears that the Levy family were part of a Jewish community in England who had come there from Eastern Europe a few generations prior to that. I have not been able to confirm where/when the Levy family moved to England, but I have confidence that my DNA analysis is correct. So while the Levy family did not have the same type of experience that Jane Seymour’s family did a century or so later, I was still able to identify with the discrimination that Jewish families in Europe experienced.