My father-in-law has traced the family tree back to the year 950, through the fog of feudal spats and jousting competitions. In the distant past, some of the best data came from tax documents, often paid with farm animals, as dutifully recorded in preserved documents.
So we visited the tiny town of Dinkelenberg, and is now Germany, but was Hesse at the time. The Tinklenberg name that descended from there is now my middle name.
We found one English speaker, this smiling girl who was grooming her horse, with a captivating sparkle in her eye, and the look of a distant relative. Then the break truck arrived, and it all seemed like a land lost in time.
And it reminded me of an old blog post I wrote on my second visit to Skype Estonia:
“I stumbled across a nugget of sculptured prose from Patti Smith, which eloquently captures the resonant emotional filtration of a newfound friend and, in a more abstract way, the curious cultural immersion I felt in my Estonian homeland:
“There are those whom we seek and there are those whom we find. Occasionally we find – however fractured the relativity – one we recognize as kin. In doing so, certain curious aspects of character recede and we happily magnify the common ground.”
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