h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, Dmitri

Nimrod was Noah's great-grandson. He is thought to have been a great leader, and also to have married his mother . The latter would be a good reason not to be confused with him.

Nimrod was also the title of one of Elgar's "Enigma Varitions," and it is thought to have referred to Augustus Jaeger, who was Elgar's publisher.

Dmitri, was your uncle three generations back a music publisher? If so, he has been forever memorialized. I sang a vocal version of the Nimrod variation last year

Or were Biblical names popular in your family in older times? If so, I can sympathize. Several generations of my mother's paternal line were named Abel. Luckily they didn't have older brothers named Cain---or did they?

Nimrod was also listed in the Mesopotamian archives as a famous ruler - for 1000 years.

No, GGGuncle Nimrod wasn't a music publisher. He was in the Confederate army, which is just about all I know about him. Alas, Biblical and other very odd names were commonplace back in the day. I recently located a so-many-great-aunt named Novella. Which sounds kind of literary, but still...

And then I got back to the early 17th century and found one distant (possible) ancestor who was a minister at Jamestown. The record described him as a 'painful preacher'....it was a compliment...

I laughed until I cried.

Coming from New England, you're lucky if your ancestors weren't named 'Flee Fornication Abernathy' and 'Honour Thy Father and Mother Barnstable'. Puritan names are the pits.

My ancestors were so restive that they practically begged to be allowed on board the Mayflower . Family legend has it that one ancestor watched another ancestor get on the ship. Fortunately, Mayflower was a common name for transatlantic ships then. My ancestors came over on many a Mayflower.

My mother's ancestors were Bemises. But 1640, there were around 40 Bemises in eastern Massachusetts. They were buried in Roxbury and other parts of Boston, but their scions were o restive to stick around. They had to be in the forefront of the wave of settlers who formed Watertown, and then Weston, and then the area around Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. As soon as new settlers began crowding in around them, they were off to more isolated spots like Granville, Vermont. A scant generation or two further, and they were in upstate New York, and ultimately northern Ohio, which is where my mother's parents were born. Ohio must have gotten too crowded or them, because they went north into rural southern Michigan, which is where my mother was born.

And the westward migration was just getting started. My mother's two oldest brothers hopped on airplanes are migrated to California with most of their children. Even the aunt who stayed in Michigan had a daughter who moved to Iowa and raised a large brood.

I like to think that I'm part of the retrograde wave, as my mother went east instead of west, and here I am posting to a website further east still.

There's a lot of that moving around going on.

I always told people my grandfather was the only person I ever knew who went east by covered wagon.

Maybe it a biblical wagon, a coveted one.