In just a few days time I will come to realize that I have traveled not just across the vast Atlantic Ocean but, somehow in some mysterious way, transported through a time warp as well. All within a twenty-four hour time span I have left a twentieth century land of modern skyscrapers and advanced technological marvels and my-take-for-granted middle class worldly comforts to a far different land, one that I could not before even begin to conjure in my most unrestrained imagination. It would seem as if I somehow had stepped back in cosmic time and dimension to a much earlier period, to that of the late nineteenth century, to a world of horse and buggy, to another vastly older regressive world into an era that surely my parents and grandparents knew and experienced in their childhoods. World War II devastated Holland. Nazi officials had destroyed thousands of buildings and farms and robbed Dutch households of their precious valuables. Hunger stalked the people; some starved to death at the end of the war. I am but a child but I see for the first time and first hand the devastation of this terrible War. I will come to see rubble stretching for miles, for as far as the eye can project, with mountainous piles of brick and stone and steel that were once enduring structures. I will view vast cemeteries lined with thousands upon thousands of white crosses marking the final resting places of American and Canadian soldiers, not very much older than I, who had died in battle here. Reconstruction is now going on everywhere. New buildings, churches, schools, factories, apartments, roads, and bridges. I am bursting with pride that my Father is part of this American magnanimity.
The family surname is derived from the Italian first name Paladino. The first recorded Paladino was a medieval knight and the nephew to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, 742-814 AD. Many romantic fables are told of Charlemagne and his paladins. The most famous of the paladins was Roland, the favorite nephew of Charlemagne. It is Roland, the Italian, bestowed by Charlemagne with the name Paladin, who may be our famous ancestral noble Cavaliere that all Palladino's and modern-day Pauldine's are descended from. genealogy and objective interpretation of these topics can spell the difference between real family history and fanciful family folklore. It is in a whimsical and fanciful vein that I portend that the Palladino and modern-day Pauldine clan is in some way related to the famous Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and his equally famous nephew, Roland the Paladin. But, who knows! Perhaps a future Palladino explorer with the inclination and, more importantly, possessing very deep pockets, might one day embark on the eternal quest for the truth and in the process even perchance recover Roland's magical sword, Durandal.
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