Actor Warren Hymer played this bumbling bodyguard in the 1942 not-so-classic Hitler, Dead or Alive. This is the second time that I’ve featured a “bad” movie in my blahg. The reason for this one is that the full character-name of “Dutch” also happens to be my name...

Before the Internet, I believed that my surname was limited to my family. However, in 1999 I was able to compile sizable lists — culled from telephone directories — of similarly-named people in both North America and Germany.

The name is sufficiently rare to make me wonder if all these people — myself included — are descended from only one or two families some 500 years ago. The lack of specifics in my family history would make it somewhat difficult to ascertain a concrete connection — outside of my own immediate family — to anybody else with the name.

DNA profiling could conceivably solve the mystery — but such tests are still very expensive and, of course, one needs willing samples. Dutch, in case you were wondering, is cognate with the word Deutsch, German for “German”.