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Archiver > SANDERS > 2001-05 > 0990554871


From: "DONALD J. SANDERS" <>
Subject: Re: [SANDERS] Fwd: RE: Origin of Sanders Surname
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 18:07:51 -0000


A few years ago I wrote my name, SANDERS, on a piece of paper and showed it
to a friend who was from Macedonia, and asked him if he knew what my name
meant. "Sure", he said, "Alexander." I always like the explanation that
"S'Anders" was derived from "Sons of Alexander", or, as I interpret it to
mean, "followers of Alexander". However, that's my own thoughts.
Don Alexander


From: "R. A. Hettinga" <>
To: "DONALD J. SANDERS" <>,
Subject: Re: [SANDERS] Fwd: RE: Origin of Sanders Surname
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 12:44:45 -0400

At 3:52 PM +0000 on 5/22/01, DONALD J. SANDERS wrote:
>I have found that there are a great deal of "Sanders" in Holland, and they
> consider it a Dutch name and it is still very popular there. Including
one
> of the largest hardware supply houses in Holland is "Sanders". When I
was
> last in Edinburgh, Scotland, I went to a tartan mill (the Scottish clans
> colors), and they had an index of Scottish clans. Sanders was listed, but
it
> said that they were followers of the revolutionary William Wallace, and
they
> were either killed, imprisoned, sold as slaves, or fled Scotland after
> Wallace was executed. The mill did have a tartan with blue, yellow and
black
> in it, as I recall.

"Sanders" is short for "sons of Alexander", as in Alexander the Great, some
people like to say, though it's hard to imagine that's an actual fact. :-).

The Sanderses in Scotland were somehow affiliated with Campbell clan, if I
remember right. Nice to know about the Dutch Sanderses, as my last name is
Hettinga (my mother's name is Sanders), and Hettinga is Frisian, if not
exactly Dutch.

BTW, there still might be something to this Alexander the Great thing. For
instance, one of the founders of modern rocketry was an associate of
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky named Tsander, who being an orthodox Christian,
might have come up into Russia from the Byzantine empire.

People can move around quite a bit in several thousand years. The Celts,
red hair, tartans and all, came from somewhere in middle Eurasia to the
east of Turkmenistan (where modern Akul Teke warhorses were developed,
including, ironically, Bucephalus, Alexander's own horse).

And, of course, forefathers of the Gypsies (contracted form "Egyptian" in
English), aren't Egyptians, but a group of *Hindu* mercenaries (the gypsy
word for "outsider" is taken from the Hindu word for "civilian", for
instance) sent to fight the Moslem invasion of India. After their defeat,
they hired on with various Turkish sultans, and by way of the Ottoman
conquest of the Balkans found themselves in Europe without a home, like,
maybe, the Sanderses themselves?


Cheers,
RAH

--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: >
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>;
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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