So far, no one has turned up a Gronigen connection. Back as far as 1630, at least, the Lugtharts were islanders, from Overflakee, in the estuary of the Maas (Meuse) River. There were no castles, no known pirates: those were purely American inventions, because everyone in America numbered a king, queen, count or baron among his ancestors, and likely a cattle rustler, or Jesse James as well. And a Cherokee Indian, of course. If every American who claimed a Cherokee great-grandparent were telling the truth, there must have been at least a million people in the Cherokee Nation.
Maybe the truth isn't as romantic. We Lugtharts were like everyone else: laborers, shopkeepers, farmers, schoolteachers . . . but when I had entered all the known family data into the computer, and printed it out, I was amazed at the feeling it gave me. I no longer needed myth: I had a family. A real family, over three hundred people recorded so far, stretching back before the American Revolution, promising to go even further back, and going forward as well. There are (according to a quick search on the internet) Lugtharts not only in the USA and the Netherlands, but in France, England, and South Africa too. There are Lugtharts in the USA who are only a generation or two removed from me, whom I've never met, never even heard of -- whom I want to know.
I've seen lots of old family pictures, even whole albums, thrown in the trash can. "It's probably worth something, to someone," I've heard the owners say, but there aren't any names on the pictures, and I don't ahve room for them in the new apartment."
They were just gray or sepia-toned people in funny old clothes, with funny hair, and no names, casualties of a move from a house to an apartment, who only really died when the last person who could say "That was Aunt Jenny! She died when I was ten," had themselves died.
Is there a kind of immortality in being remembered? I think so. I never knew my great-grandfather Kryn, but when my eldest daughter was five or six, she saw his picture, and said "Papa, where did you get those funny clothes?" That's a kind of immortality, too. At least we can know that Grandpa's nose has survived, or maybe it was his ears, his eyes, that quirky little smile . . .
Now, with computer programs to manage the family archives, with scanners to make copies of all those old pictures, and with CDs to store them and the internet to distribute them, the generations past don't have to die that last death, the death of memory. It's not likely we'll turn up any Lugthart ancestral portraits from the year 1500, or even 1800, but Great grandpa Kryn died in 1890, and he was relatively young, in that photograph.