Ritu, over at But I Smile Anyway created a Where In The World…? post asking her readers where in the world they are from. She’s got some interesting international family connections spread across the world and she’d love to know which other international connections they have too!

And I thought hey! This would make one interesting post to do! Here we go, Ritu! Let’s hope the pingback works or I’ll have to be spamming your comment box with my link. :p 

I was born and bred in Singapore, a tiny little country that’s just a dot on the map.

I spent 2/3rd of my life there and moved to Thailand 11 years ago.  

I’m  a mutt: Half Javanese, a quarter Japanese and quarter Portuguese.

My father is Javanese and spent his entire life in Singapore. His late father was pure-bred Javanese who hailed from the deep of Indonesia. His late mother was a Singaporean of Malay-Indonesian descent. 

My mother is half-Japanese, half Portuguese who was born in Malaysia. She went to school in Singapore then migrated to Singapore and became a Singaporean after she married my dad.

Here’s an interesting snippet of my late maternal grandfather: He was born in Japan and was apparently a child soldier who had escaped the Japanese army during the Japanese Occupation in World War 2 and got adopted in Malaysia. So it is likely that we have got some distant relatives still unknown to us living in Japan!

My late maternal grandmother as I understood,  had embraced the Buginese ethnic culture from South Sulawesi with her inherent Portuguese lineage and lived in Malaysia. (Don’t ask me why. Even I am confused!)

I have a small family. There are only 4 of us and most, if not all of our relatives are mostly in Singapore and Malaysia. Then some are probably still spread across Indonesia.

My parents have a distant relative whose daughter lives in Australia.

Then I married a Dutchman. Both of his parents hail from the Netherlands. 

My husband’s uncle lives in England and is married to a lady from Scotland. 

That’s pretty much where the tentacles are spread. In terms of lineage, our kids are  pretty much a breed of authentic “muttified” mishmash packaged as “Dutch” based on their father’s origins.

Who knows in a few more years from now, we’ll be living somewhere else after our big move to the Netherlands! And for good measure, I am anticipating that our kids would probably be spreading their wings to somewhere else in the world too!

So, my dear readers, where are you all from and can you trace your international family connections? I’d love to know, too!

Make sure you pop to Ritu to read her very interesting rundown of connections across the world.  And if you like, write about it, ping it back, use her image if you want to and share along Ritu’s Where in the World post.

Let’s make this world smaller by sharing. Ritu’s a genius. This is fun!