doesn't fly zone

I'm really confused. In my understanding of reality, only one country in the world has recently called out its air forces to bomb its own people. And in response to it, the UN put together a resolution to create a no fly zone over that country so that would not continue or escalate.

No "taking sides" in a civil war. And the "protecting civilians" has a technical definition in the standard military sense: no deploying materiel only available to the military against people who lack same. Sort of a "rules of the game" issue, only it's rules of war.

Yet I hear all this commentary about how we aren't doing enough to support the rebels, and how we aren't doing enough to support democracy activists in other countries and how we're going to have to completely remove the existing leader and blah blah bleeping blah. You can definitely have real issues with the policy approach being taken, but it's virtually identical to the one pursued both by Bush Sr and Clinton. Have we just forgotten how this worked?

Maybe I just forgot all the sniping on the sidelines. I'm not sure I was paying enough attention back in the 1990s to even notice the commentary. Then again, maybe there wasn't as much commentary.

Fonda

I'm increasingly satisfied with the accuracy and sourcing of the Veeder branch of my family tree. I've got the 1937 Vrooman authored Veeder Genealogy (a family registry, mostly). I've got Pearson's Contributions for Schenectady (albeit missing the Johannes branch supplied by Vrooman and the Kline's book). I even now have a couple local history books for the time-and-place (Burke's _Mohawk Frontier_, and Jacobs' _Colony of New Netherland_).

Obviously, whenever you have a surname-focused branch, you have a bunch of opportunities for additional research involving all the women who married those men. Names like Schenck/Schanck have caught my eye because I saw that name in the DRC records for Caughnawaga, and names like Fonda obviously caught my name, both as the name of the village and because of those famous people what have that name.

I don't know that it seriously crossed my mind that it might be possible to determine the relationship between me and those famous people. Also, because a lot of other surnames in Schenectady had a strong flavor of South Holland about them, I had sort of assumed there would be no more of this, goddess, please, not more Frieslanders, please.

Foolish, foolish, me. I thought, hmm, I should find out whether Fonda is in genlias. Not really: just one baptismal record from the Americas and one mother on a death record, so likely a returnee. Next step: where _exactly_ does that surname come from?

According to: http://www.fonda.org/

Descendants of Jellis Douw Fonda (1614-1659),
immigrant from Friesland, Netherlands to
Beverwyck (now Albany), New York in 1651

For further detail:

http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm#Origins

Lots of wacky, speculative stories there. However if you click through to:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nycoloni/renbioset.html#42

"Gillis Fonda
About 1646, Pieter Hartgers advanced some money to Gillis, a boy in the service of Antony de Hooges, possibly Gillis Fonda; Oct. 19, 1651, the court gave Gillis Fonda permission to distill liquor in't greenen bos (Greenbush), in a house belonging to Evert Pels, next to the brewery, on condition that he enter into a contract as to the Gerechticheijt vande Heeren Mrs (dues to the patroon and codirectors). Gillis Fonda is at a later period commonly referred to as Gillis Douwes Fonda. To judge from his name, he must have been a Frisian."

While that's _really_ inobvious to a casual reader, the point is extremely well taken: Gillis Douwes is _definitely_ Frisian as a name.

*sigh*

And yeah, I share ancestry with those famous people. Weird.

ETA: Perhaps setting some sort of new record for truly tiny village:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagum

1630, Anneke Jans

I'm not sure which part of this is cooler. First, I have a line I actually _trust_ that gives me multiple arrivals prior to the highly suspicious line that leads to the Planter in 1635. In particular, I've got a 1630 arrival in the form of Anneke Jans with her first husband (altho my ancestor she had with her second husband).

Second, Norway! Yay!

And third, _Anneke Jans_! Specifically, some of her descendants were the people who started that 3 century long lawsuit about the New York site of Trinity Church.

There is, of course, a catch. Her second husband, Bogardus, worked as a clerk in Guinea, West Africa for a while before coming to New Netherlands. *shudder* In case it isn't totally obvious (which it wouldn't be if your head wasn't buried in the geopolitics of the first quarter of the 17th century), that means the guy was working at a slave depot.

I'm extremely sorry. I don't feel at all bad that he died in a shipwreck off Wales.