Archive for September, 2010
Hurray! A Farmer In The Family!
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
It is always great if you can find more about an ancestor than just the basic data like date and place of birth. Noble ancestors are really great because they tend to leave more records. However, only seldom do we have the luck to find such an ancestor. Fortunately, there is another group of people that can leave lots of interesting trails in the archives: farmers.
Farmers usually start out as an insignificant farmhand. However, as they grow older, many of them start their own farm, and then it gets interesting. A farm involves property. There usually is the farm building itself with one or more barns, there is land to grow crops on or pasture the cattle, there are tools, machines, and animals. All these possessions leave their trails in the archives.
First of all, a farmer usually has a detailed will, specifying how the farm, cattle, and land should be divided among the kids after his death. These wills usually include detailed lists of buildings, land (with cadastral references), cash, and cattle.
To give you an idea, this is a list I recently found for a client (translated from Dutch):
- 10 horses.
- 29 cows, young and old.
- 2 pigs with piglets.
- 30 chickens.
- 2453 guilders in cash (today about € 122,600 or US$ 158,000).
- Meadows in Klein Zuid inherited from his first wife.
- Meadows inherited from his parents.
- Meadows bought from Kornelis Schipper, Adam Walter, and Dirk Groen.
- A farm with land at the Oude Uitslag van Putten, bought in 1829 from the heirs of Klaas Maartens Braat.
Second, farmers tend to buy and sell land to get better pastures and fields, or to expand the farm. Such transactions are all registered at a notary and usually contain detailed descriptions and cadastral information.
And third, you can look up the farm and the land that belonged to it in the cadastral archives. Sometimes the farm still exists or old photographs of it can be found.
So should you ever hit upon a farmer, congratulations! Do you already know of a farmer among your ancestors and want to know more? I would be happy to dive in the archives to see what we can turn op for you. Just send me a quote request with the details.
Chasing A Hare
Friday, September 3rd, 2010
A hare, by Lorenz Frølich
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
Maybe it was a nice sunny spring morning or a stormy autumn afternoon when, sometime in the late 1800s, Cornelis de Haas set sail for the biggest voyage of his life. He left everything he knew behind to seek a new and better life in Australia.
When the ship finally arrived, Cornelis reported to an immigration officer and told him his name, in the best English he could. The officer gave him a puzzled look. Could you repeat that, sir? And Cornelis said it again. The officer gave him another puzzled look. “Haas”, said Cornelis. “H-A-A-S, like in hare.” He put his fingers on top of his head to mimic a hare’s ears. The officer finally smiled and said “Oh, a hare!” and then scribbled down: “Cornelius de Hayr from Sassenheim, Holland.”
150 years later, one of his descendents started tracing his family tree and got stuck on Cornelis. Understandably, he couldn’t find any “de Hayr”s in the Netherlands, and nobody knew the name had originally been “de Haas”…
Of course, we don’t know for sure whether the above is what actually happened. But incidents like it have been very common with Dutch emigrants in English speaking territories. The Dutch language has sounds very unfamiliar to the English ear and names that seem impossible to pronounce. In an era where written identification was non-existent and names were passed on orally to government officials, many Dutch names underwent “creative” transformations.
Some examples:
– “Stoffel” became “Stephen”.
– “Pieterke” (short for “Petronella”) became “Nellie”.
– “den Coonink” became “King”.
– “Jeichje” became “Jennie”.
– “Nieuwenhuizen” became “Newhouse”.
Obviously, you are not going to find any of these people in the Dutch records by their anglicized name. Hence, the first task for anyone with Dutch roots is to reverse-engineer their ancestor’s name back to the original Dutch writing. Read our in-depth article on how to go about this….
