As I begin this post, it’s currently Week 39 of this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge. Yet here I am, only on Week 28. The good news for me is that it’s only seven weeks since I posted my entry for Week 22, which has me on pace of one per week.
The relevance of Week 22 is that was when I dropped the teaser trailer about my Great x4 Grandfather, Cornelis Dirksz Bakker, and my happenstance discovery that he was Mennonite. Although it probably wasn’t much of a teaser when I did the entire tell in that post:
[R]ecently I was going page-by-page through what I thought was the baptism register for the Dutch Reformed church on Texel trying to find the entry for Jan [Teunisz de Waard], but it turned out it was the register for the Mennonite community on the island. I was gobsmacked to discover another of my Gx4 Grandparents, Cornelis Dirksz Bakker, was listed there. As well, Cornelis’s parents’ marriage was in the same register. I had no idea I had any Mennonite ancestors. I don’t know how my very Catholic grandmother would have received that piece of information.
Cornelis was born on the Dutch island of Texel in the village of Oosterend on September 4, 1789 to Dirk Jansz Bakker and Naantje Cornelis Bas. As Mennonites do not practice infant baptism, the registration of his membership in the church contains his actual birthdate, not the date of his baptism. The register shows that Cornelis enrolled as member of the United Mennonite Congregation on February 3, 1811, when he was 21.
Sometime in twenties, if not earlier, Cornelis began work as a sailor. However, the first record I have of his occupation is the registration of his marriage to Maijke Jans Kuiter, who he married at Texel on April 25, 1815. Together Cornelis and Maijke had two children. The first, Naantje, was born three months after her parents’ wedding. The second, my Great x3 Grandfather, Jan Cornelis, was born in 1819.
Sadly, Maijke passed away a few years later, on January 4, 1824. Two years and two weeks later, on January 15, 1826, Cornelis remarried. His new bride was Aaltje Willems Bijl, who he married on Texel. One year after their marriage they had their first child, with two more children in the following five years.
I came across an interesting story about the birth of Cornelis and Aaltje’s second child, Antje, set out in a letter from 1850. Antje was born on December 24, 1829 while her father was at sea. The midwife, Telia Boereland, failed to register Antje’s birth at the time. The midwife claimed that she had instructed the postman to register the birth, but he neglected to do so. In 1850, it was necessary to attend the District Court in Den Helder to obtain an order to register Antje’s birth. The letter stated that all other women present at the birth were deceased, other than the midwife. Aaltje was still alive in 1850, so it’s not clear why she was not mentioned in the letter, although there was a reference to “the interested parties,” which might have included Aaltje. The letter stated that the court directed that the declaration of birth be entered in the civil register.
In 1833, Cornelis moved the family to Den Helder, a major military and commerical port situated on the mainland only a couple kilometers from Texel. In Den Helder, Cornelis and Aaltje had three more children. While his work still involved the sea, Cornelis went from working on a boat to working on the docks as a porter. He continued in that occupation until the penultimate year of his life.
Cornelis died on December 8, 1858 in Den Helder, at age 69. Aaltje lived another eight years, passing away in 1866.
Cornelis’s death registration.