Watch And Learn - About Me (Family)

Page Preface

A bit of my family history from the “About Me” section of “Watch and Learn.” (Note: I’ve avoided discussing specific living relatives in order to avoid attracting unwanted attention to them. -jh)

You can find the various sections and clips, with their respective embedded videos, here:

My dad was born in The Hague, NL, in 1943. Both of his parents and their families were active on the anti-fascist Dutch underground, helping thousands of people escape Europe during the war. He came to the US at age 4 ½ and later served as a US Marine from 1961-1966 – serial number ending in 7452, for you folks who want to dig, but much of his record was lost in the 1973 NPRC fire in St. Louis, so the full picture may no longer be available.

He often recounted, as his earliest memory, the Schutzstaffel breaking into his home when he was perhaps two years old, looking for his father to arrest him and send him to the camps as a political prisoner. I was only aged two myself when his dad died, and I have no documentation, but the family story has it that he was in fact captured very late in the war – after Hitler’s suicide – and was on a railroad cattle-car for the camps when he and several other men were able to overpower the few guards and escape with perhaps 70 others during a stop.

My mother is Choctaw, Cherokee, Caddoh, Black, and a smidgen of Irish and German probably mixed in there somewhere. Her father’s family, particularly her patrilineage, are the subject of a biography titled “A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas. (affiliate-encoded link; non-affiliate link here)” by Billy D. Higgins, who is a professor at the University of Arkansas. As far as I know. the book remains in print but may not yet be available electronically.

I was raised with a deep set of values related to authority, power, honor, fairness, responsibility, integrity, and resistance to tyranny. My mom’s people were dirt poor folks from southeastern Missouri who moved to rural Michigan for agricultural work. My dad’s were strangers in a strange land.

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Page Preface