Tuesday 26 July 2016

Forgotten Tall Immigrants


My short term memory is quite atrocious these days and I make notes on my phone of items for the blog as they occur to me. Well, I was watching something on telly last night and it sparked an idea for a blog subject. I thought to myself; "Shall I make a note of that?", but decided not to, as I was convinced I would remember it. An hour later I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what on earth it was. 

It did return to me, however, when I woke up this morning. It was while watching Michael Portillo on one of his railway journey documentaries and the fact that the Ellis Island immigration centre, which was built to accommodate 4,000 immigrants a day, sometimes had to cope with 16,000 a day. Between 1892 and 1954 it processed over 12 million immigrants, mainly from Europe, who made America what it is today. A salutary lesson poke in the eyes for people who don't like immigrants.


My son's are tall (both taller than me), particularly No.2 Son, who is already 6' 1" at age 16 (and seems to eat like the proverbial horse). This morning I saw on the BBC news website that a new study has shown that when it comes to height, Dutch men and Latvian women tower over all other nationalities. Latvian men are 4th in the tall stakes and Dutch women are 2nd. My two sons are a product of a genetically Anglo-Dutch father and genetically Latvian mother.

Now when it comes to my two daughters, by a 4' 11" English mother, they both struggle to reach 5 feet. Genetics is a strange thing.


3 comments:

potty said...

I know I thought of something to say about this...but.. er..

Chairman Bill said...

Sorry, forgot you'd left a reply.

A Heron's View said...

Am so glad that you wrote this blog post and that you are years younger than me.
For now I know that I'm A OK :-)