Category: Netherlands

52 Weeks – Week 19: Food and Drink

This week’s topic for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Food and Drink”. Finally, a topic I can really sink my teeth into!

Soup of the Day

Last year on The Great Canadian Baking Show (a direct adaptation of The Great British Bake Off), one of the contestants said she was using her great grandmother’s recipes. There are things my grandmothers made that I have been trying to recreate or emulate for years, but nothing from any of my great grandmothers. I also realized that if I had recipes from my great grandmothers, my kids would have recipes from their great great grandmothers. I love to cook, both my kids really like being in the kitchen with me, and my eldest shares my love of genealogy, so it would be special to have those kinds of recipes.

I asked my mother if she has any of her grandmothers’ recipes, and asked the same of my mother-in-law. I now have a few of those recipes.

From my wife’s mother, I got a recipe for brown bread handed down from her grandmother. Among other things, it calls for two cups of rolled oats, nine cups of flour, and a cup of molasses. Despite that volume, it apparently yields only three loaves of bread. While I am rather good at baking, I don’t really enjoy it, so I haven’t yet tried out this recipe, especially with the volumes of ingredients it requires.

Something I have tried making, however, is cranberry sauce using a recipe from my wife’s great aunt. My wife is actually a very good cook, but doesn’t enjoy it as much as I do so she rarely does. However, she’s usually the one who will make this cranberry sauce. Besides, I don’t actually like cranberry sauce.

So many cranberries!

My mother said that her maternal grandmother was not really a good cook, except for one thing: raisin cookies. While I take my mother’s word for it, I find it hard to get excited over raisin cookies.

My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook and baker. She made her soup noodles from scratch and pickles from cukes my grandfather would grow. While my grandmother was born in Saskatchewan, both her parents were  Germans from Russia, so a lot of her cooking reflected that cultural heritage. My mother, also a very good cook, learned from her mother, so a few of our favourite meals as kids also reflected that background.

My grandmother also made her own preserves, jams, and jellies. Of those, one of my favourites was her chokecherry jelly. A year after she died, I moved away from home to attend university. While unpacking, I discovered that I had a jar of her chokecherry jelly in one of my boxes. Realizing that I had the last jar of her jelly in the entire world, I savoured and stretched it out as long as I could.

Making stock during my latest attempt to replicate my grandmother’s soup.

My dad’s mother was not as good a cook. Rather, her usual fare was either very, very good or…not so very good, to put it kindly. In fairness, a couple of things she seemed bad at was because she was cooking for my grandfather’s tastes. For example, he enjoyed meat beyond well done. However, my grandmother made amazing soup. I have spent years trying to recreate her groentensoep met balletjes (vegetable soup with meatballs). While it’s a common traditional Dutch soup, everyone has their own little twists on how they make it. I exchanged many emails with one of my aunts over the years as we tried to work out my grandmother’s special way of making it.

My grandmother made a lot of customary Dutch dishes. Some I really liked, others I found…less likeable. While it was usually greasy, I really liked her hachee, a beef and onion stew. However, I really disliked her stamppot, which she made more often than not. Stamppot usually consists of potatoes boiled and mashed with other vegetables. My grandmother typically made boerenkool stamppot – kale and potatoes. The way my grandmother made it, she’d boil the vegetables beyond recognition, then my dad would make me cover it in gravy and mix it together. I was sure I was being punished for something.

One day during a trip to Alberta to visit my parents, I found myself in my grandparents’ neighbourhood. I thought the time of day was right, because it meant that I was probably too early for supper. While I loved her soup, I didn’t want to run the risk of ever having to eat boerenkool stamppot again. Unfortunately, my grandparents were eating early that day and my grandmother had already started cooking and invited me to stay for dinner.

Much to my surprise and delight, in addition to her soup, I discovered that my grandmother was making nasi goreng, an Indonesian fried rice dish. As Indonesia was a former colonial possession, Indonesian food is very common in the Netherlands. It’s fantastic food, It makes up for the fact that some staples of Dutch cuisine seem to be things made on a dare – or named on a dare, like snert (a nickname for ertwensoep, traditional Dutch split pea soup, which is delicious).

I asked my grandmother if she was trying something new. She replied that she made it all the time. I did a mental double take and said that I had never seen her make Indonesian food before in my entire life. “Oh, that’s because your father doesn’t like it, so I never made it when your family came for dinner.” So all those years I had been choking down boerenkool stamppot we could have been enjoying nasi goreng! Needless to say, that evening I let my father know how unimpressed I was to make this discovery.

Rijsttafel, a sampling of Indonesian dishes served wth rice, at the former Balilicious restaurant in Vancouver.

While it seems that Dutch cuisine leaves something to be desired, I may be exaggerating to some extent. Some of my favourite treats and dishes are Dutch and I’ve collected a few cookbooks with Dutch recipes. Unfortunately, I have yet to find many recipes that work for our entire family. While my version of my grandmother’s groentensoep is generally a big hit, other things seem to divide the house fifty-fifty.

Making rodelinzensoep (red lintel soup) using a recipe from my father’s cousin.
Snert! Fun to say, fun to eat!

Before I leave the topic of Dutch food, never accept an offer from a Dutch person of dubbel zoute drop: double salted black licorice. Lots of Dutch people love to see the reaction of their unsuspecting victims. I love black licorice, but without the addition of the Dead Sea.

Over the last few years, I’ve started to acquire recipes from more extended branches of the family. My brother-in-law is Jewish, and I’ve acquired a few recipes and cooking tips from his sister and mother. Sometimes I’ll try making a particular dish from recipes I’ve found online, and then sought guidance from my sister’s mother-in-law as to how to tweak and improve the dish. What I have discovered is that the best latkes are the ones made by someone else – I find them to be a lot of work!

Meanwhile, I just remembered that at the time of that episode of The Great Canadian Baking Show, my parents were in the middle of moving house, so my mom said she’d look for her mother’s notes and recipes after they settled in. However, visiting her over Christmas and well after the move, I completely forgot to follow up on it. Hopefully I can remember this seven months from now, when visiting her next Christmas!

52 Weeks – Week 15: How Do You Spell That?

How Do You Get “Vanderfluit” From “Goeman”?

Week 15 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge!

A swimming pool with my name on it, located on Fluitpolderplein in Leidschendam, Zuid Holland. I thought this would be of interest to one of my sisters, who has practically lived in a swimming pool since childhood.

When I was in elementary school, the principal always asked me if I was Belgian. One day I asked my mom why he kept asking that. “Because you have a Dutch last name”, she answered.

That was no help.

While I had already started working on my family tree, and knew that my dad was Dutch, I had no idea that surnames had any ethnic or cultural significance. We lived in a small prairie town with lots of Ukrainian and Francophone surnames, all of which seemed to be unintelligible jumbles of letters. I included my surname in that regard, as it too seemed to be a meaningless concoction of letters. I had no idea that they had meanings in other languages. To add to my confusion, at the time I thought that they only spoke French in Belgium. I had not yet learned that more than half the country spoke Dutch.

Like many surnames, mine has undergone many changes over the generations: van der Fleuyt, van der Fluijt, van der Fluit, and for many of us in Canada, Vanderfluit. For a while people would misspell my name as Vander Fluit, following the pattern used by a prominent Dutch-Canadian politician in British Columbia named Bill Vander Zalm. In addition, in the Netherlands, the tussenvoegsel (the “van der” part) is often disregarded when sorting names alphabetically, such as for a directory. You might also see it abbreviated as “vdFluit”.

Before proceeding further, there is a myth to address. For Dutch genealogy, it’s one that’s as common as the one that would have you believe that immigration officials changed your surname at Ellis Island: people in what is now the Netherlands did not have a surname until forced to do so by Napoleon in 1811. On the contrary, while some people did not have one, surnames were common in many places well before 1811, although in some provinces patronymics and farm names prevailed until that time. Every branch of the Dutch side of my family tree that I have traced into the 18th century had well-established hereditary surnames by that time. The big change that occurred in 1811 was mandatory civil registration, requiring everyone to register a fixed surname.

That said, my direct ancestors tried out a few surnames for size before settling on the general “v d F”. My great x10 grandfather, who was likely born in the 16th century, does not appear to have a hereditary surname. Rather, his name – Dirck Jansz – is suggestive of a patronymic (“Jansz” = “Jan’s son”). Dirck and his wife, Maritgen, had at least two sons. The elder son, Jan, adopted the surname “Sieren”, which he passed on to his children. The younger son, my great x9 grandfather Johannes, adopted the surname “Goeman” or “Goetman”, which he passed on to all his children. I like to think that I am descended from John Goodman.

However, one of Johannes’s sons, Pieter, chose not to retain the surname his father bestowed upon him. Notarial and judicial records show a number of land transactions showing that Pieter was using the surname “van der Fleuyt” by the end of the 1660s. A land transaction after Pieter died involving some of his sons and his second wife used the surname van der Fleuyt.

So how did the name “Fleuyt” originate?

There is a street in Leidschendam, Zuid Holland named Fluitpolderplein, in an area that was a once a separate village called Veur. The website for the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg used to have information about all the street names in the community. It is no longer on the municipal website, but it is still accessible through the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive. The old municipal website provides this explanation, which I have translated from the Dutch:

The square and adjacent street between Prinsensingel, Noordsingel, de Amstelweg, and de Graaf Willem de Rijkelaan is called Fluitpolderplein. This was decided in 1970. But where does the “fluit” in “Fluit Polder” come from anyway? According to a historian of Veur, Hendrik Brouwer Schut, it may have something to do with the whistle of the grinding mills, or possibly the “fluitenkruid” (“cow parsley” or “Queen Anne’s lace” in English). [The Dutch name of the plant refers to the fact a flute or whistle can be made from the stem.] However, there may be a better explanation. In 1648 a large part of the territory of the polder already belonged to a certain Jan Dirckxz, who also went by the name “Fluijt”.

According to the street sign for Fluitpolderplein, the polder was located alongside the “Fluijtermolen” (Fluit Windmill), which was built around 1641. So the question I have is: what was named first, and for what? Were the windmill and polder named for Jan Dirckxz, or the other way around? Was the whistle the sound of the mill or the wind through the foliage?

With the next generation, the name became “van der Fluijt”. The spelling remained that way until the time of my great x3 or x4 grandfathers, Dirk and Pieter. Interestingly, that was around the time of mandatory civil registration. I have not yet found a “naamsaanneming” (“name taking”) record for the name that would have been completed at the time of mandatory civil registration. However, given that the family had used the surname for generations, it is unlikely that Pieter had to register. I also note that the change in spelling coincided with Pieter’s curious move from South Holland to North Holland. The family he left behind continued with the “Fluijt” spelling.

Visiting my cousin in the Netherlands, whose house is on “‘t Fluitnpad”. Which is actually the name he gave his driveway. In English, it says “The Fluit Path”.

When my grandparents came to Canada with my father and his sisters, they initially used the traditional Dutch spelling, with lower case letters for the tussenvoegsel and the spaces in between. Over time, the name came to be Canadianized, with it written as one word with a capital “V”. However, the spelling remained fluid for many years.

As for me, both my first name and surname pose problems and are frequently misspelled and mispronounced. Many of my relatives in the Netherlands have difficultly pronouncing my clearly not Dutch first name, with the alien “sh” sound at the beginning. To be fair, I find the Dutch pronunciation of my surname difficult, as the “ui” sound in Dutch doesn’t quite exist in English. In fact, I never heard it pronounced in proper Dutch until I started university and had a Dutch-Canadian history professor who used it my first day of class. What I find mindboggling is how my name is continuously misspelled by people who have only ever seen it in writing. I have a fun collection of the most amusing misspellings I gathered from correspondence I received in the course of the job I had many years ago.

Ta dah!

I have to say, it is both really cool and very strange to visit a place where people can spell your surname without asking or being corrected.

52 Weeks – Week 14: Check It Out

Not Quite “Fun With Flags With Sheldon Cooper”, it’s “Fun With Pedigree Charts”!

Not Sheldon Cooper
(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Check It Out was a gawd-awful Canadian sitcom that ran on CTV in the mid-80s. When it first aired, I only watched it because it starred Don Adams, better known for his role on Get Smart as Agent 86 Maxwell Smart. Get Smart was my absolute favourite show when I started watching it in reruns when I was four. My mother tells me that in kindergarten I would not respond to my teacher unless she called me “Max”, something I can actually remember doing. I own the entire series on DVD. Unfortunately, Check It Out was as terrible as Get Smart was terrific. How Check It Out got Don Adams is beyond me. Not every Canadian sitcom can be Corner Gas or Schitt’s Creek.

“Check it Out” is also the theme for Week 14 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge. Like the Flowers theme of Week 11, this week’s theme didn’t really inspire me at first. However, in the Facebook post introducing the theme, “check it out” could be a direction to look at something that might be “something neat”. This reminded me of something I was thinking of posting to this blog outside of the 52 Ancestors Challenge.

In a Twitter post six years ago, David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist at New England Historic Genealogical Society, suggested creating a “longevity pedigree”, a pedigree chart showing the ages ancestors lived to rather than their names. I thought that was pretty neat, so I created my own. At the time most people, myself included, simply created hand-written charts that we tweeted. For this blog, I tidied it up.

Shortly afterwards, the idea was adapted for birthplace. Here is mine.

It’s interesting how homogenous it is on my father’s side compared to my mother’s. While it is much more varied on my mother’s side, the variety increases as you go back along my paternal grandfather’s line.

Of course, looking only at a person’s birthplace can be deceptive. For my ancestors born in the Russian Empire, they were neither Russian nor Ukrainian. They were Germans who settled in what is now Ukraine in the 19th century, forming part of a larger group known as Germans from Russia. I have mentioned these ancestors in this blog several times before.

For fun, I did a birthplace pedigree for our kids.

There are all sorts of other kinds of pedigrees like these that you can make. One example I’ve seen is people creating pedigrees for their ancestors’ religions. Another I’ve seen is an occupation pedigree. Then there was this mysterious pedigree Yvette Hoitink posted to Twitter:

It was her introduction of the Level-Up Challenge, which involves improving the evidentiary foundation for each ancestor in your family tree. While I haven’t “officially” undertaken the Level-up Challenge, I find I’ve been sort of doing it for a few of my lines without actually setting out to do so.

What kinds of interesting variations of a pedigree chart have you created?

52 Weeks – Week Seven

Landed

I’m starting to realize that when I choose a topic for the theme of the week for the 52 Ancestors Challenge, I should look ahead to see what other topics are coming up. That way I can avoid getting to a topic like this week’s, “Landed”, and seeing that I’ve written on the topic before. Then again, a little repetition here and there won’t hurt.

If I had approached this topic a few hours ago, I would probably be sitting here casting about in my mind as to what “landed” means to me. Fortunately, our eldest son inadvertently gave me a focus to write about. During dinner, out of the blue, he asked “besides Opa, did any of our ancestors come to Canada on steamships?”

The Sibajak, which brought my father and his family to Canada.
Pier 21, Halifax

Opa is my father, the Dutch side of my family. I’ve already written about his coming to Canada on the Sibajak. He and his family came in early May 1954, travelling from Rotterdam to Halifax. They landed at Pier 21, which could be described as the Canadian equivalent of Ellis Island. My father’s aunt and uncle came over four months earlier, in January 1954 on the Groote Beer, while another aunt and uncle followed in late May 1954, on board the Castel Felice.

While it was a Holland America ship during his crossing, built and originally operated by Rotterdam Lloyd, along with other ships that they mainly used to go to the East Indies. Built in 1927, the Sibajak served as a troop ship during World War II. After the war, the Sibajak was one of a number of ships operated by Holland America that were used almost entirely for Dutch emigrants, along with the Grote Beer, Waterman, and Zuiderkruis. It was sold and scrapped in Hong Kong in 1959. When I was in Hong Kong in 1996, while travelling around the harbour and between its islands, I wondered how close I might have come to what scraps of it might remain.

This is a fascinating short documentary about a voyage the Sibajak made to Australia carrying Dutch emigrants. The video is in Dutch, but the images convey a lot of meaning.

In the late 1990s, my parents went on an Alaskan cruise on a Holland America ship. During the trip, my father, who loves to talk to people, fell into a conversation with one of the older hands on deck. My father mentioned having come to Canada on the Sibajak. After a few questions from the crew member, my dad learned that the man had been on the Sibajak during my father’s trip, in his first year or two of service.

On my mother’s side, the most recent ancestor to arrive by steamship was my great grandmother, Emelia Anton. She came to Canada at the age of nine, with several of her siblings and her parents, Jacob Anton and Margaretha “Margaret” Heck. They were Germans from Russia. The family sailed out of Hamburg on June 18, 1912 aboard the S.S. Pennsylvania. They arrived at the Port of New York (Ellis Island) on July 1, 1912. Their declared destination was Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, to join Emelia’s older brother, Rochus. The passenger manifest stated that Jacob paid for the entire family’s transport, other than that of one of his daughters-in-law, whose passage had been paid by her father.

The Anton family, circa 1910. Likely taken in Selo Suchoi, Veronesch, Russia.

Emelia had not had much schooling before coming to North America, but was very religious. She said that she was frightened and nervous during the journey, as she did not know anything about where she was going and did not fully understand what was going on. However, on reaching New York, she said her fears subsided when she saw “the Madonna”. When she saw that, she knew she would be safe and all would be well. Of course, the “Madonna” was the Statue of Liberty. As she had never heard of it before, she thought it was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Passenger list for the S.S. Pennsylvania showing the Antons.
Jerome Lerner (1895-1954)
Michael Lerner (1862-1947) and Barbara Schmidt (1865-1936)

Emelia’s husband, Heronimus “Jerome” Lerner, was born to parents who were also Germans from Russia, Michael Lerner and Barbara Schmidt. Michael and Barbara came to the United States in May 1893 aboard the S.S. Lahn, with the five children they had at the time. They landed at Ellis Island and made their way to Clay County, Texas. Jerome was the first child born to Michael and Barbara in the United States. They had seven other children in Texas after Jerome was born. Jerome moved to Saskatchwan in 1917, preceded by an older brother. Jerome’s parents followed a year later. Other siblings came north at other times.

Passenger list for the Lahn showing the Lerners

The ancestors furthest back in time that I can find who came to North America on a steamship were my great x3 grandparents, Robert Nelson and Elizabeth Joseph. They were both born in Muff, Donegal, Ireland in 1818 and married there in 1842.

Joseph Nelson (1818-1902) and Elizabeth Joseph (1818-1902)

Sometime in the early 1840s they had moved to Linwood, Renfrew, Scotland. They were there at least by January 1844, when their first son, Samuel, was born. By 1850, Robert was working at Brown’s Sugar House, on Roxburgh Street in Greenock, Scotland as a sugar baker. Sugar bakers usually refined muscovado sugar, an unrefined brown sugar imported from Barbados.

On September 3, 1850 Robert and Elizabeth, along with their three children, departed Liverpool on board the ship “North Atlantic” bound for New Orleans. For a long time I had been confused by references I had seen to them coming over on “the north Atlantic”, thinking it meant the route they travelled. It wasn’t until I came across the passenger list that I realized that “North Atlantic” was the name of the ship. Having a name like that makes it difficult refine a search to distinguish the ship from where it sailed. However, while I have not found very good sources, it appears that the North Atlantic was a steam powered ship.

Passenger list for the North Atlantic showing the Nelson family

The records show that there was at least one other family headed by a sugar baker from Brown’s on the same voyage. Robert and Elizabeth were part of a company of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) converts travelling from the United Kingdom to Utah. The family spent a short period of time in Missouri, where in 1852 Elizabeth had her first child born in America. By late 1854 they were in Farmington, Utah, where my great great grandfather John Alexander Nelson was born.

Looking at my pedigree for this post, I realized I might have one other ancestor who might have travelled from the United Kingdom to the United States by means of a steam powered ship. That would be my great x3 grandmother, Maria Hadlond, who was born in Cheltenham, Gloucester, England in 1838 and who emigrated sometime in the 1850s. I have not really researched this branch of my family beyond collecting names and basic vital stats. For whatever reason, it has never caught my interest.

Susan Turple (1818-1906)

I also have a great x3 grandmother, Susan Turple, whose family had been in Nova Scotia since the 18th century, who would have travelled by means of a ship with sails. In 1849, Susan joined the Mormon church in 1849. In 1852, she went from Halifax to Boston to join a westward migration of Mormons. It is most likely that the initial part of Susan’s travels was by means of steam powered ship.

Before these people, any ancestors I have who crossed the Atlantic would have done aboard ships with sails.

Speaking of looking ahead, I see that next week’s theme is “Courting”. Since I am writing this on February 14, I wonder if that should have been this week’s theme!