With Cornelia Pieters Kooij (sometimes spelled “Kooi”), I begin the paternal set of my Great x4 Grandparents. We’ll be hanging out with the Dutch for the rest of this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge.
Cornelia was born sometime in early December 1787, in Den Burg, a village on the island of Texel. It’s the westernmost and largest of the Wadden Sea Islands (or Frisian Islands) that stretch from the Netherlands to Denmark. She was the youngest of two children born to Pieter Jans Kooij and Elisabeth Jansz “Liesbeth” Boerse.
Cornelia was born eight months after her father died, on April 13, 1787. I have spent a lot of time trying to discover the reason for Pieter’s death. Living on an island, many of its inhabitants had jobs on the water. I have a lot of Texel ancestors who were harbour pilots and sailors – dangerous work. However, I have no idea what Pieter’s occupation was, as not all of my Texel ancestors worked on the water. While I have several records for Pieter, none included his occupation. More importantly, none of them indicate his cause of death.
Page 187, December 16, 1787: “Cornelia ‘Posthuma’, from Den Burg. Parents Pieter Kooijman and Liesbeth Boerse. Witnesses Jan Bruin and Maartje Boerse.”
“Posthuma” means Cornelia was born after the death of her father.
While Cornelia only had her mother and older brother, Jan Pietersz, growing up, I do not know what kind of family support Liesbeth had raising her children. While I know the names of all four of Cordelia’s grandparents, I have no idea if they were still alive when Cordelia was a child. Cordelia also had aunts and uncles on both sides of her family, so maybe they provided support. However, I’ve gone page-by-page through some of the registers for Texel trying, to find other information, but “Kooij” and “Boerse” were surnames that I rarely spotted.
Cornelia’s brother died in July 1812, when she was 24. A year later, on October 13, 1813, Cornelia married Jan Teunisz de Waard. According to the registration of their marriage, Cornelia’s mother was still alive at the time. That is the last mention of Liesbeth Boerse that I have seen in any record.
An interesting thing about Cornelia and Jan’s marriage was that it occurred a month before a popular uprising forced the French out of the Netherlands and ended Napoleonic rule in the country. The marriage register, along with the documents in their huwelijksbijlage (“marriage supplement”, a set of documents a couple had to provide in order to marry, such as birth extracts and other vital records) bear stamps of the French Empire.
Together, Cornelia and Jan had nine children over a 23 year period, all of whom were most likely born in the village of Oudeschild on Texel. Strangely enough for an island, Oudeschild was the only village on the coast of Texel at the time. There is now a ferry terminal at the southermost point of Texel, but it was constructed long after Cornelia’s time.
Cornelia died on June 19, 1850 in Oudeschild.
A Deck of Ancestors 