You opened this post asking what Bill Gates is doing on this site. Is he be a member of any family described here?
Go on reading…
I’ve always admired Bill Gates, even though these days he is somewhat out of fashion. Yesterday I read about a study conducted by the company Comparisun stating that today there are none, but at least eleven current billionaires may one day become trillionaries. That means each of them achieve a fortune of at least a trillion dollars before they die! Isn’t increadible?
Among the eleven are: Six Americans, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Segey Brin, Former Microsoft’s Seve Balmer and Dell’s Michel Dell. Three Chinese, Xu Jiayin of Evergrande a real estate conglomerate, Jack Ma of Allibaba and Ma Huateng of Tencent a technology conglomerate. An Indian, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance is a conglomerate of energy, telecommunications, retail and others. A French Bernard Arnault of LVMH a conglomerate that includes brands such as Luis Vuitton and Moet Hennessy. In my opinion, they forgot to include Elan Musk on the list, the one who wants to colonize Mars, I think he might as well have a trillion dollars someday.
But Bill Gates isn’t in the 11 either! Do you know why??
Because following the example of notable Americans like Andrew Carnegie, famous for saying: “man who dies rich, dies dishonored”, John D. Rockefeller, John Hopkins, Cornelius Vanderbilt and many others decided, he who was once the richest man in the world, donate to philanthropic causes, while living, 99% of all his fortune. But he didn’t stop there and convinced Warren Buffet, another who has also been at the top of the list of the richest men in the world, to do the same and donate 99% of his fortune to philanthropic causes. How can one not admire a person like that?
I never forget two interviews I watched from Bill Gates. The first, was in the early days of Microsoft when he decided to stop being an IBM vendor, to become a competitor. The interviewer asked: But how do you intend, with a company as small as Microsoft to compete with the giant that is IBM? He simply replied: IBM has the wrong strategy. At the time I was jaw dropped, because he was endangering the whole of Microsoft and everything he had. Years later time gave him reason.
Later still, in the second interview, speaking of his philanthropic causes, he stated that today humanity is living the best times since the emergence of man. When I heard that, I thought, the best times? With everything that’s going on in the world? I thought it might be right, but I had a lot of doubt.
Well this doubt dissipated when I decided at random, try to find records of my Italian grandfather and my Portuguese great-grandfather.
At this point the story turns upside down and is converted into history, not of rich men, millionaires, billionaires, but exactly the opposite, a history of poor families with nothing living in Europe in the 19th century.
Portugal to my surprise, has available on the internet in digital form baptisms records of virtually all churches in the country. I decided without knowing much to search the records of some of these churches to see if I could find my great-grandfather’s birth record. The period I chose was the end of the 19th century, between 1880 and 1900.
I found no records of my great-grandfather but leafing through the digital pages, I noticed that many baptismal records also brought along the date of death. In several cases the death occurred in the same year of birth or the following year. In other words, many newborns did not reach their second birthday, some not even the first. Not to mention the ones born dead, which I believe were not recorded, or the cases of mothers who died during childbirth, whose death was noted in the mother’s record and not in the record in front of me. I also found several records indicating that the mother was single. I can only imagine the consequences of that for a woman back then.
Several records indicated just below the newborn’s name: Free for being poor. I thought about what that meant and I think the registration was done without payment because the parents didn’t have the money to pay for the baptism. Imagine, not having money to pay for your son’s baptism! In addition, baptism records informed the profession of the father and mother. Many were working daily workers which means they were paid only the days that they worked. This type of profession I also noticed was common in Spain.
The conclusion I drew from my brief research is that Bill Gates is really correct. When I see how people lived 120 or 140 years ago and when I think of immigrants who risked everything, even life, to try something better in the new world, I’m sure that these European immigrants in the vast majority of cases are much better off today than their ancestors.
Of course terrible living conditions still persist in much of the world mainly in Africa, America, India and Asia. The immigrants who today risk everything to try life in Europe, the USA or even Brazil, is because they also have nothing, but at least they know where they are going. I’m sure the Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards who immigrated to Brazil at the end of the 19th century, didn’t know where they were going. About this I intend to write a post on european immigration to Brazil, I discovered a lot that even having ancestors who immigrated, had no idea what this saga was.
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