Footprint on the Moon
When I was a boy, teachers would squint at my last name and ask, “Where’s that from?”
I’d shrug and give them the family legend:
“Probably a bunch of drunks fresh off the boat at Ellis Island. Some clerk couldn’t spell the long Dutch name, so my distant relative just pointed to the bottle in their fist—hot rum—and said, ‘Call us that.’”
My dad wrote “Dutch ancestry” on my birth certificate.
But now the Internet has made it quite clear that the name Hotrum stands amongst the oldest names in American and Canadian history. And our DNA is a dominant strand in Ontario, Canada, and New Jersey USA.
That strange name wasn’t a typo—it was a map.
We were among the first German settlers in New Jersey, then the 21st petitioners for a land grant in Ancaster.
So we weren’t just immigrants with a hangover.
We were original colonists—first in one of the thirteen colonies, then in one of the first provinces of Canada.
Far from the drunks I imagined, we were quiet architects of two nations.
But the real story is migration—a people forever pushed west by faith, war, and hope.
My German ancestors came from the Palatinate, a green valley just south of Frankfurt. After the Reformation, their Protestant beliefs made them targets. So they fled west to Rotterdam, boarded ships for the New World, and planted roots in central New Jersey.
They stayed loyal to the Crown—until the Revolution forced another choice. Defeated, they crossed the border into Upper Canada, becoming some of the first settlers there.
Fast-forward to 1963: my father loaded us into the car and drove west again—this time to Southern California, the new promised land of sunshine and opportunity.
Then, in 2005, when that dream soured—when the coast felt overrun by scoundrels—we packed up once more and headed to Austin, Texas.
Now even Austin feels the shift. The same forces closing in.
So where does a Protestant Christian run when the frontier runs out?
I say: our final migration is to the New Jerusalem—the holy city that descends from heaven like a perfect orb, as described in Revelation.
Its dimensions? Exactly the size of the moon.
So yes—
In the great arc of westward flight,
from the Rhine to Jersey,
from Canada to California,
from Austin to the face of the moon—
my family’s next home is the true Promised Land
landing our feet softly on a mountaintop outside the Earthly city of Jerusalem.