This Henry James de Jong (amongst many) is totally unique. My six siblings share exactly the same pedigree (heredity), but they are quite different from me too, for random and environmental reasons. The randomness keeps things interesting and environment is fun to speculate about (e.g. eldest vs. middle vs. youngest), but it seems that heredity is the foremost factor in defining who we are.

Our nuclear family stories can be quite eventful, even dramatic, and they shape who we are. So we understand, intuitively, that the influence of family dramas coming before us — amongst our ancestors — can be just as strong. Our stories are connected to theirs, and we feel an easy bond with kin folk in our shared history, even if they are distant cousins. We feel we know them (we ‘ken’ our kin).

Henry de Jong has made some unsuccessful attempts at knowing his family tree over the past twenty years, but has only recently succeeded. Since December of 2022, my family tree has grown to 7,000 people on MyHeritage.com, all of whom I am distantly related to. I’ll grant that most of those relations are totally or only vaguely relevant to who I am, but the big picture is valuable to me, and there are discoveries amongst direct ancestors that I’ve found compelling.

For the purposes of this website, I’ll refrain from dwelling on my past 35 years as a renovator. Suffice it to say, I like building things. More to the point, is that I have the experience and patience (it can be quite a slog) for uncovering family tree connections on MyHeritage, and that I am open to hiring out this ability and familiarity to anyone else who might want to ‘find’ themselves.

My side hustle for 25 years has been building websites, so this too is a skill that might be of value to others, especially those who would like to establish their own repositories of family lore.

For the rest, I’ll say you can best sense who I am by reading what I write.