JUST LIKE Jimmy himself, 100 years old two weeks from now, his ancestor Henk was well regarded. Hendrik van Valkenburg from Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands where people talk with an immediately recognizable accent, Holland’s own drawl. They were motivated emigrants, the Van Valkenburgs, much like the other Dutchmen who left Holland behind in the seventeenth century. Holland was a wealthy nation, there was plenty of employment, education was good and solid. Those who left for America had thought it through, they deliberately chose adventure.
Henk sailed across the ocean because Peter Stuyvesant had urged him to do so. He spoke his languages, Swedish, Finnish, and once he settled in New Amstel, in what is now New Castle in Delaware, he learned the Cherokee language. Henk became an interpreter. And a pub owner. There were strict rules among the Dutch in America not to sell alcohol to native tribes. Stuyvesant trusted Hendrik van Valkenburg.
VAN VALKENBURG was not a name that easily kept its spelling across the pond. It soon evolved into Falconburg, Faulkenborough or Fortenberry. In Hendrik’s case it became Faulkenburg, but his son Henk junior made it Falkinburg. Eventually granddaughter Margreet married a Mr. Helms, and through that line the family tree eventually produced Lillian, Jimmy Carter’s mother.
Lillian had old opa Henk van Valkenburg’s genes. She was a nurse, spoke her languages, and she liked to venture into unknown territory. When Miss Lillian was 68, she had the Peace Corps send her to India to care for leprosy patients. One day her son called her to say he wanted to be president. “Of what?” asked Miss Lillian. Of America.
Oh. Okay.
THE REST is public history. Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 but not re-elected in 1980, and mama was fine with that. It meant that all the Carters came to live again in and around the small town of Plains, Georgia, and that’s where they all ended up living well and safely. Lillian died in 1983 and is buried there, and Jimmy who outlived her by forty years will soon have a grave in his own front yard.
Mother knew a thing or two about funerals. Her own ceremony lasted six minutes; she didn’t want anything more than that. Jimmy, during his years in the White House, sometimes dispatched her as ambassador to a complicated funeral, like when Yugoslav President Tito died. Then she would see upclose how not to do such events. “Keep it simple,” she taught her child from an early age.
That generally worked out well. Of the eleven Dutch American presidents, Van Buren (Buurmalsen), Lincoln (Hoorn), Grant (Leiden), uncle and cousin Roosevelt (Tholen), Harding (Beusichem), Ford (Durgerdam), father and son Bush (Hardenberg), Obama (Leiden) and Carter, the man from Limburg kept it simplest by far.
Happy birthday in a few days, Jimmy. Job well done.
