Theodore Roosevelt: An AutobiographyRoosevelt, Theodore
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Roosevelt, Theodore
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
My father's paternal ancestors were of Holland stock; except that there
was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who was one of the Pilgrims who
remained in Holland when the others came over to found Massachusetts,
and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to New Amsterdam.
My father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her forebears had come to
Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the same ship with him; they
were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place and
time. They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,--with a
Celtic name, and apparently not a Quaker,--and peace-loving Germans,
who were among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged
the Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means
altogether peaceful people, the Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania
a little later, early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a
woman of singular sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in
her relations with her husband and sons. Although she was not herself
Dutch, it was she who taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby
song of which the first line ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always
remembered this, and when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union
between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at
first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation--at
which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose
ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America
two centuries and a half previously, and to find that the descendants
of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at
least of the same nursery songs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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