History is made of manifold histories

After a long interval we have been able to realize the idea of making a genealogy of the family, and yet it certainly is a work in progress. To this date the results are partial to the information we have been able to gather. However, we have already reached a global vision of the extension of the family. I can toy with unusual ideas, for example the fact that my daughter, born in the 21st century, has a 1/1024 of blood shared with the legendary patriarch of the stem Stibbe, David Sjoesjan; if he would not have happened to emigrate to Amsterdam from Persia at the dawn of the 18th century my daughter would not likely exist, or at any rate she would be very different. At a farther extreme, Don Alonso de Ugarte, lord of the House of Ugarte in Orozco, Spain, about the year 1500, is separated from my daughter by 14 generations. When Thomas Barton left England for South America a few years before the the 19th century War of Independence in the continent, he probably felt that his bones would lay sometime in a place like the Chacarita Cemetery of Buenos Aires, where they rest now, but he would have had no idea that in Peru his grandchildren would create an industrial emporium associated with the soft drink of the broadest consumption on earth.

The history of mankind is made of manifold smaller versions of history adding up together the history of each individual. A family history is a thin thread that goes across the whole fabric of history. In a way the image of one family represents that big History that people never thought they were being busy with day after day in their lives. We are what we were, we have been what we become, we go back to what we will keep being and what we should get to be.

The photographs that were the starting point of this project now illustrate just a small group of persons who are in our closest circle. In turn, the family has become immense, this site records more than 5600 persons. If at the beginning I inherited a little bunch of old photographs, now my children can inherit from me besides these photographs a connection with this enormous group of people with a link in common, we are all family.


Jorge Heredia
Amsterdam, August 2006


(Text translated from Spanish)


A vertiginous idea full of hope


I grew up with the vague idea that we were a small family, and that for that reason we were very close to each other. Arguments like those I saw in other homes, about life styles or material things, were unimaginable with us. We didn't walk away from our differences, but everything remained always on the level of a loving discussion. An even vaguer and unmentionable idea was that we were so few in our family because of The War.


That suddenly this project gathers the names of more than 5000 persons, dead and living, and that all of them are my family, is a totally new experience for someone who always thought that 'there was almost no one left'. That my children have so a diverse mix of roots -to name only a few- in Iran, Elburg, Blokzijl, Prague, Chiclayo, Arequipa, England, Galicia and Basque Country, may not be totally new to me, but a genealogy like this one makes it very clear.


That the same World War II and the nazi era shows up again in the genealogy is definitely unavoidable. A gigantic part of the members of my family that lived in the first half of the 20th century was killed in nazi concentration camps. The painstaking typing of the names of complete families, from babies to just married couples and to the elderly, all killed during the nazi dictatorship, was not the easiest part of this project.

In spite of the large amount of information we have found, there still is so much that we don't know. Of some people we only know a name, sometimes dates and places of birth and death. But about the rest of their lives we can only guess. Of some others we know a bit more, because archives have some information about them or we have heard stories about them in the family.

I also wonder who were the ancestors of the persons we already know. The members of the family that have lived so long ago that we don't have a chance to know who they were. In many cases we don't even know where these persons have lived. For instance, we can suppose that the ancestors of the oldest Beem we have found -or even himself- came from Bohemia. But how and when did they come to Holland, and where in Bohemia they came from? Under emperor Charles VI in the 18th century in Bohemia and Moravia there were imposed strict rules in order to limit freedom to Jews - for instance, only the eldest son in each family had the right to marry and start a family -, and many Jews emigrated in those years. But maybe the name Beem (Bohemian) was only an indication, such as Polak (Polish). And what turn of history made David Sjoesjan undertake the long journey from Susa, Persia (now Shush in Iran) to Amsterdam? We can only guess.

Our knowledge of the Sittigs and other Czech ancestors is still very limited. Sittig does not seem to be a common surname for Czech Jews, but we did find a number of 19th century Sittigs buried in the Bohemian village of Ckyne. I still hope to find more about this. Something else that I would like to investigate more is our link to Franz Kafka. It has always been mentioned in the family that the writer is supposed to be related to us, but we don't know exactly how. Probably the relationship is with the family of my great-great-grandmother Julie Kafka. And possibly, in a relatively small, close-knitted and endogamic Jewish community like Prague in the late 19th century, all Jews were ultimately related to each other.

On the Peruvian side we know very little about the Heredias and other ancestors from the North of the country. The fact that we know more about the Garcías and Ugartes is because these were better off families, and becasue they were from Lima and Arequipa, the two most important cities of a very centralist country. In these families are some distinguished members, like the naval heroe Guillermo García y García and his brother Aurelio García y García, the physician Alberto Barton Thompson, who isolated the bacteria that transmits Carrión's disease, a type of smallpox and was called bartonella in his honour -and his brother, soft drink tycoon Leopoldo Barton Thompson.

But personally I have greater fascination for just the less famous family members, the people we don't even know exactly how they were called or what language they spoke. And that our children, and their children, and the children those children and the children still to come, are all related to each other, is a vertiginous idea full of hope.


Heleen Sittig
Amsterdam, August 2006

(Text translated from Dutch)


Sources

If history is made of many versions, on the other hand nothing is what it seems to be. History is one of the many versions of itself. Some of these versions are separated from fiction just by some meager documentation, which in turn is liable to interpretation. This genealogy contains for sure many errors and omissions that deserve duly correction. Our future findings will set the pace for newer updates of this site presenting our newest version of history. We have decided to publish this genealogy because we think that even the most sketchy version of history is a starting point to begin understanding each other.

This site gathers data from different sources. In any case we would have never been able to gather so much information in relatively so little time without the ubiquitous presence of the internet. We are in debt to the many people whose research we have accessed through this medium.

The information about the Peruvian branches is partly based upon oral records of the older relatives still living. Often the lineages are no more that a list of names interconnected to each other withouth any reference to the time or place where they lived.

The information about the genealogy of the Garcías comes from the genealogy site of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. The genealogy of the Ugartes is based upon an article by Alberto Rosas Siles that was published in the No. 8 of December 1955 of the Revista del Instituto Peruano de Investigaciones Genealógicas, a pleasant story that by times seems to be a knight novel. Jeremy Howat's site, British Settlers in Argentina—studies in 19th and 20th century emigration, has been a surprising source of valuable information documenting the presence of the Bartons in Buenos Aires. Some data about the Peruvian branches come from the sites of Family Search and Genea Net. By the latter the page of Francisco Javier Carbone Montes has been particularly helpful.

The genealogies of the Stibbes and the Gokkes in a great deal come from the site of David de la Penha, checked against the site of Zvi Silver. A few additional branches come from the sites of Wendy Harreman-Schlosser and Willem Huberts.

The genealogy of the Sittigs of Prague has been gathered by Ernst Sittig visiting graveyards in the Czech Republic. The genealogy of the Beems is the only one based on our own research. We started with the account of Louis Beem, whom we only knew the last years of his long life. If Louis had lived a few years more he would have been surprised and no doubt happy to know that his family originated in Elburg around the 18th century. We have checked his information with data found in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, and together with the data found in other Dutch archives grouped under the site TOP - Toegang op Personen we have developed with patience this long branch of the family tree. Information about the Cracaus and the De Langes comes from the site of Reinier and Dirkje Bobbe, and about the Vechts from the site of the Stichting Families Vegt en Van der Vegt.

For all the Dutch family the sites of the Center for Research on Dutch Jewry - Dutch Jewish Genealogical Data Base, which stores large data bases about anything linked to this topic, and the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, which has information about the dead ones of the Dutch Jewry during the WWII, have been very helpful.


Navigation

Because of the typically large volume of information almost any genealogical site is unfriendly to the user. In fact, a genealogical site may be too heavy for the occasional visitor that does not look for anything specific. And for the visitor that knows what he is looking for all the rest of the information may appear irrelevant. This site has more than 5700 pages linked to each other in a way that can be easily understood by any visitor, however the extent of the site can make look heavy any thinkable navigation .

The language of the site is English with two exceptions: This introduction page, which is available also in Spanish and Dutch; and the notes that add information about the persons in their individual pages, which usually are in the original language of the source where the information was found.

Above every page there is a menu to the main pages of the site, and below is a list of pages which in fact mirrors the menu above.

The option 'surnames' gives access to a list of surnames. The option 'persons' gives access to a list of pages that gather alphabetically all persons in the site. If you click on one person you will reach the individual page of this person. Each person has an individual page with options to navigate across generations, from parents to children, from children to parents, from grandchildren to grandparents, etc. The option 'trees' gives access to a list of graphical versions of genealogical trees. If you click on a person in the tree you will find below the text about that person. The option 'text' give access to a list of genealogical reports in plain text.The option 'photos' gives access to a page with thumbnails of all the photographs in the site. If you click on any thumbnail you will access the individual page where a large version of the photograph is featured. The option 'intro' gives access to this introduction. The option 'home' will bring you to the homepage of Jorge Heredia. The option 'email' will open your email client in the case you wish to share anything with us. We will be delighted to hear from you, specially if you have something to tell us about the family.

The list of persons as well as the list of surnames is enormous. They can be very confusing if you are not sure where to start. A good way to start is by the oldest persons, such as the ones mentioned above. Inversely, you can also start by the youngest ones, for example Rafael Heredia Sittig.


Software

The genealogical data base has been created with Personal Ancestral File v. 5.2, freeware of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. In order to transfer the data to webpages it has been used GED2HTML v. 3.6, software developed by Eugene Stark. The graphics of genealogical trees have been produced with KSTableau v. 4.1, freeware developed by Tom de Neef. The output produced by these programs has been adapted in our own design using Macromedia Dreamweaver v. 8.0. After digitalization the photographs have been adjusted individually using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and inserted manually in each page.

This site has been designed for monitor resolution of 1024 x 768 px., or larger. The considerable minority that still uses 800 x 600 px. resolution can access the contents of this site, but probably they will not see them in an optimal way. This site has been tested with Windows XP operating system and with Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera browsers, without showing any major problems.