Category: Personal Story

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 18: Social

It’s been a bit of a struggle to keep up with the 52 Ancestors Challenge over the last few weeks. A combination of real life and lack of inspiration have been conspiring against me, but I’m proud that I’ve kept up my participation in the challenge. We’re over a third of a year into it and I’m still going strong.

This week’s theme is “Social”. One social aspect of our extended family is part of the inspiration for the title of this blog, A Deck of Ancestors. The 52 weeks theme fits in with the idea of a deck of cards and the fact my family is crazy for cards.

My brother shuffling the deck for yet another round. It was probably 1:30 a.m. and we were likely starting our nth game of something…

When I was little, it seemed that there was always a game of cards going on whenever we visited family. The game that captivated me the most was cribbage, with its rapid game play, unique board and scoring system, and arcane language and what seemed to be strange incantations: “fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six…“. Even now, when all my siblings and I are at my folks for Christmas or special occasions, it does not take long for a card game to break out, which usually lasts late into the night. Sooner or later, significant others and spouses are assimilated into the tradition.

My maternal grandfather taught me how to play when I was six or seven. Heaven forbid if you didn’t follow all his customs in the way you shuffled, cut cards, or played the game. The last time I visited him before he passed away, we spent most of the day playing cribbage. It is a wonderful memory that I still cherish.

In addition to cards, board games were a huge part of our family life when I was a kid. My siblings and I often would receive a board game for Christmas or our birthdays. Games are also a huge part of our home with our kids. I still have a few of the games I had as a kid, plus we have a great selection of more current games.

A very small sample of some of our games.

Not long ago, I also taught our eldest cribbage. Of course, the time I get one of the best hands of my life was our first actual game together. He was too inexperienced to appreciate what I had, and it’s not all that fun getting a hand like that against a kid playing for the first time.

Set up for 29. Unfortunately, the other five did not turn up with the cut.

52 Weeks – Week 16: Negative

It has taken me most of the week to get to completing this week’s theme for the the 52 Ancestors Challenge, “Negative”, because that’s mostly the reaction I had to it.

The first example given in the description for the theme – and the first thing that came to my mind – was “discovering something ‘negative’ about an ancestor”. That brought to mind the ancestors that I really don’t admire. As one branch of my family tree goes back to almost the very beginning of the Latter Day Saint movement, I have a few polygamists as direct ancestors. It was an offensive, oppressive, and misogynistic practice, begun in secret likely because its proponents knew how reprehensible it really was. My least favourite of these ancestors is the one who started as a slave owner and ended up as a polygamist. I might not like these people, but I still research them because it helps in finding out more about the ancestors who I do like.

However, I had neither the bandwidth or the patience this week to write about those men any further. So how else to spin “negative” without delving into the things that weigh us down, cause us to complain (ugh – writing up source citations!), or simply “yuck our yum”, as my kids might say? Unfortunately, while I have many tradespeople in my lineage, none of them were electricians, short-circuiting that idea for further discussion.

Image: Copper Wire – Positive and Negative by Tudor Barker available under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 2.0 Generic licence.

I know that for this challenge a lot of people are writing about photo negatives, but it seems to be a well-worn path of discussion. Nevertheless, here is an attempt I made many years ago to turn some negatives I found into a positive, without really having the kind of equipment that I really needed or that was even practical. Years later, I came across prints that were made from those same negatives. This is an example of but one of those photos.

Me with my Aunt Diana, who I wrote about on Week Nine.

Meanwhile, for this week’s theme another participant in the 52 Ancestors Challenge, Karen McPherson of I Seek Dead People, posted about a pair of father-and-son rouges, both named Robert Cross. The elder was born in 1613 and the younger was born in 1642. I am also descended from Robert the elder, through his daughter Anna. I have done absolutely no research on this branch of the family since the mid-1990s. My other lines have been of much greater interest to me and I’ve just never come back to the Crosses. After reading Karen’s story, I don’t think I’m in any more of a hurry to get back to them. That said, I now know more about an ancestor that I didn’t know before. (You’ll want to see Karen’s blog post for the cartoon, which I found exceptionally funny.)

What I’d like to do is end this week’s theme on a note of positivity – with a negative! While I hope I don’t jinx things by pointing this out, our family has managed to get through more than two years of pandemic without coming down with a single case of COVID. We’ve all gone in for testing at various points in time over the last two years, and fortunately the result has always been negative. Today we tested our youngest again and, happily, the result was once again negative.

That’s the kind of negative I like to see!

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.