twining thoughts ascend
the lattice walls of this heart
taking root within
Salt Lake City 08 Jun 2012
George Ellington
Sharing Sights and Sounds, Words and Wonder
twining thoughts ascend
the lattice walls of this heart
taking root within
Salt Lake City 08 Jun 2012
George Ellington 
Where was your father from, George? His name wasn’t originally Ellington?
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Ah, Laura’cığım, I thought you knew that about me. Papa was born in Bamberg, Germany as Helmut Georg Waltrapp. He kept the Georg part obviously when he was adopted, but the rest of his identity was rewritten. I’ve just always found it odd that I go through life with a copy of a name of a man who wasn’t even given that name until his late teens. I always thought I should have been a William Waltrapp or a James Patrick Stewart. … Or something with Sean in it.
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I might have known that at some point, but I had no memory of it. Very interesting! Where was your mother from?
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My mother was born in Arkansas, but her family (I have confirmed through much avid genealogical research and even connecting just this year with cousins whom I had known nothing about before) is mostly Scottish. She was a Stewart, a line of the Stewart family that left Perthshire many generations ago, although once settled in the U.S., they kept intersecting with other Scottish clans. My grandfather Zenus married a daughter of the Blair clan from Blair, Scotland. My great grandfather Felix married the daughter of two rather Scottish lines that had come together: a man from the Landrum family of Aberdeenshire and a woman of the McWhorter’s of Edinburgh. Most of my mother’s family history is like that, although I did find one lineage of my mother’s tracing back into Germany. When I told my father about that one, he got quite a kick out of it, especially after all the years she had chided him for being a stubborn German! … I know, that’s more than you needed to know. But I do get rather excited reading back into the family’s past.
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Fun! So you learned your German when you were a child, then?
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When I was a child? If only! No, my dear father settled in quite fully to American society and the English language. No trace of a German accent even. I was a true beginner of German when I took my first high school class in it. And still pretty much at the beginning when I registered for German at SFSU.
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Oh! That’s what I had originally thought. How did your father react when you started to get fluent in the language?
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“Fluent” is certainly giving me more credit than I deserve, but coming from a woman who eats languages for breakfast, I take it as a great compliment. I know my father was happy with my studies, taking pleasure in exchanging quips in German with me, although I don’t think he ever hoped it would lead to me establishing a closer tie to his family, his heritage. In his behavior, his determination, his industriousness (and perhaps his stubbornness), he is quite German, but I have never known him to entertain any notion of returning to Germany apart from the brief trips we enjoyed there.
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He probably had some unhappy memories there.
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