So Far Away from Holland

This week's prompt (week 22) - Far Away,  gave me a reason to work out the mapping feature included in one of the better known online genealogy websites and I have shown here the map it generated.

A very handy feature, because by clicking on a balloon you get a pop up showing the individual associated with that place. You can then also go in and edit the location if it happens to be wrong. For example, at first I had a person showing up in Bolivia! I knew that it couldn't be possible and when I checked it was meant to be a town in South Africa.

It also shows a bird's eye view of the family's spread around the globe. It is clear that many in the family strayed rather far from their hometown in the Netherlands.

The biggest cluster is still in Europe, mostly The Netherlands and then Germany. A surprise pops up with the balloon in the USA, Charlotte in North Carolina. This belongs to a Jansen Appelo, my grandfather's cousin.  On reflection, it is not so strange. After World War II there was large scale migration of the Dutch to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, because of the poorer standard of living in post-war Holland.

I haven't put my uncle Bill Paylen in my pedigree yet, but when I do, he will appear on this map as being located in Los Angelos, California, because he migrated there in the 50's and established himself as a sought after horticulturist, a specialist in Bromeliads. I mentioned him already in my post about the Homestead.

Germany also features strongly, not only because of Meta Reith, my grandmother but mainly because of a surprising bunch of relatives on my father's side who originated from the area around Menslage which is near Osnabruck. Why did they move? Don't know as yet.

The next far away place is Indonesia; no surprise, as it was the Dutch East Indies before 1945 and I find more family than I first thought lived there.  For examply, I get a surprise when I click on the balloons, because another member of the Lawerman family pops up and I had always thought that my grandmother was the first of that side of the family to go there.

The furthest places are Australia and New Zealand and they reflect the post war migration of my parents and my aunt and uncles and their families and the most recent generations.