Bakker – A Deck of Ancestors

52W Mark IV – Week 24: Card K11 Johanna Adriana Puinbroek

I am terribly, terribly far behind with this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge. Ironically, I thought I would be much more focused on the writing, since I had thought that I had done a thorough job on the research for the individuals I had been planning to write about. How wrong I was!

Not only did I discover that I had a lot of gaps in my research, I kept getting sucked into rabbit holes of other research. Particularly so for Johanna Adriana Puinbroek, my Great x3 Grandmother. For years her parents, Johannes Puinbroek (1786-1865) and Maria Theresia Letens (1802-1848), have been a mystery to me. So instead of writing about Johanna I spent most of the last several weeks researching her parents. After overcoming a litany of hurdles I won’t detail here, I finally cracked through some brick walls.

But first, Johanna. I find her interesting in her own right for several reasons. One is where she was born. The vast majority of my Dutch ancestors are from the province of Noord Holland, with one branch originating in Zuid Holland and migrating to Noord Holland in the early 1800s. But not Johanna.

Johanna Adriana’s birth registration. “Ledens” was one of the many spelling variations for her mother’s surname; there are also many iterations of the spelling of “Puinbroek” in the records.

Johanna was born on August 2, 1822 in Heinkenszand, a village on Walcheren, a former island that is now a peninsula in the province of Zeeland. It is almost as far down the Dutch coast as you can get from Den Helder, Noord Holland, where she and her parents moved before Johanna turned two. In a country where it seems that travel to the next town is still a major undertaking for the locals, literally moving from one end of the country to another in the early 19th century seems quite amazing.

It is largely speculation based on little evidence, but I suspect the move might have been more a result of her parent’s personal circumstances than anything to do with what was happening in Zeeland at the time. Johannes and Maria were not married when Johanna was born; in fact, they never married during the almost 25 years that they were together. That might not be unusual in itself.

However, when Maria conceived Johanna Adriana, Johannes was married to another woman, Johanna Judoca van Haever (1786-1823). While Johannes and Johanna Judoca were the same age, Johannes was 16 years older than Maria. Johanna Judoca died in April 1822, shortly after giving birth to her and Johannes’s sixth child, Josephus Bernardus. Josephus died three months later, in July.

The following month Johanna Adriana was born to Johannes and Maria. In fact, the birth registration for Johanna Adriana shows that Johannes and Maria were living in different towns about 40 kilometers apart. Maria was living in Heinkenszand, where Johanna Adriana was born. Johannes was living in Vrasene, Oost-Vlaanderen, where he was born. Vrasene is just outside of Antwerp, which was still part of the Netherlands. Belgium did not become a country until 1830. Vrasene is about 10 kilometers from Sint Jansteen, where Johanna Judoca lived her entire life. So it appears Johannes was not living near either of his partners at the time.

Sometime before 1824, Johannes, Maria, and Johanna Adriana moved to Den Helder. It appears that only two of Johannes and Johanna Judoca’s children survived childhood. They would have been 12 and 9 when their mother died and their father moved north, but they did not accompany him. They both stayed in Zeeland. I don’t know who raised them after their father left for Den Helder.

In fact, I doubt they ever saw their father again. When Johannes and Johanna Judoca’s eldest son, Dominique, married in Sint Jansteen in 1838, he attested that he did not know if his father was alive and that he did not know his father’s last residence. It would follow that Dominique likely had no idea about Johanna Adriana or his other half siblings.

The passage from Dominique Puijenbroek’s marriage registration in which he attests to the fact he had no knowledge of his father’s whereabouts. In fact, Dominique said that he believed his father was deceased.

In Den Helder, Johannes and Maria had four more children. The first, Frederika, was born on February 23, 1824, but she did not survive the day. Their last child, Willem, was born in 1834. As of 1840, the family was still living together in Den Helder, although Johannes and Maria remained unmarried. It’s a mystery to me why Johannes and Maria never married. Since Johanna Judoca had passed away, I cannot find any impediment to them marrying – to each other or anyone else.

Five years later, in 1845 when Johanna Adriana was 23 years old, Maria married a sailor named Jacob Pel. Maria was 42; Jacob was 29 – only six years older than Johanna Adriana. Like Maria, Jacob was also born in Zeeland, although by the time he was required to register for compulsory military service he was living in Noord Holland. The couple never had children and the marriage was short, as Maria died in December 1848, the day after her 46th birthday. It does not appear that Jacob ever married again.

A year after Maria married Jacob, her former partner Johannes married Cornelia Bakker, on April 2, 1846. Johannes, who was then 60, was 18 years older than Cornelia, who was 42. There were children in this marriage. Despite Cornelia’s much younger age, Johannes outlived her. She died on February 20, 1859. Johannes died on January 1, 1865.

On June 3, 1847, two years after her mother married Jacob and one year after her father married Cornelia, Johanna Adriana married Jan Cornelis Bakker, a 28-year-old sailor who was living in Den Helder. Johanna was 24 at the time. They had one child together, my Gx2 Grandfather Cornelis Jan Bakker, who was born in 1855. Unfortunately, Jan died young, at age 40, when Cornelis was only four years old.

The top and bottom of Johanna Adriana and Jan’s marriage registration. The bottom half notes that Johannes Puinbroek could not read or write. It also bears the signature of Maria Letens.

Within two years of Jan’s death, on June 16, 1861, Johanna Adriana married Pieter Dekker (1813-1885), in Den Helder. Pieter was also a sailor and spent many decades at that profession, although when Johanna died on June 24, 1881 he was a shopkeeper in Den Helder. Johanna and Pieter never had any children.

*Alkmaarsche Courant*, June 9, 1861. “Civil Register. Married June 7. Pieter Dekker, widower of Siesje Boon, from Alkmaar, and Johanna Puimbroek, widow of Jan Cornelis Bakker, from Den Helder.”

The account of Johanna and her parents is one of the more complicated stories in my family history. The countless hours of research I poured into finding it out reflects that complexity.

*Vliegend Blaadje: Nieuws- en Advertentieblad voor Den Helder*,
June 28, 1881. “Today after a short illness my beloved wife Johanna Adriana Puinbroek passed away after receiving the Holy Sacrament of the Last Rites, at the age of 58 years and 10 months. Den Helder, June 24, 1881. P. Dekker. Also in the name of my son. This is for general information.” The son Pieter Dekker referred to was from his first marriage.

52W Mark IV – Week 23: Card K10 Jan Cornelis Bakker

I recently noted that most of my direct Dutch ancestors were farmers and labourers. Jan Cornelis Bakker is another exception to that generalization. For most of his short life, he worked as a sailor in Den Helder, Noord Holland. In fact, he was the descendant of sailors on both sides of his family.

Jan was born on January 16, 1819, in the village of Oost, located on the island of Texel in the province of Noord Holland, Netherlands. He was the second child of Cornelis Dirksz Bakker and Marijke Jans Kuiter, who had married a few years earlier in Texel, on April 25, 1815. Jan’s older sister, Naantje, had been born in July 1815, just months after their parents’ wedding.

Both sides of Jan’s family have deep roots on Texel. I have traced both his lines back at least three generations. Jan’s mother, Marijke, was born on Texel around 1787. Her father, Jan Kuiter, was a sailor. Marijke passed away relatively young, on January 4, 1824, in Oost, when Jan was only five years old.

Jan’s father was a sailor on Texel. His father remarried in 1826 and moved the family from Texel to Den Helder sometime before 1833. Den Helder is a major Dutch port at the northwestern tip of the country and has been a major naval base since the 1700s. It seems that Cornelis gave up life at sea for life on the shore after moving to Den Helder. His recorded occupation was porter, most likely working on the docks.

When the family moved to the mainland, Jan Cornelis would have been in no more than his early teens. By 1847, Jan had followed in his father’s footsteps and was working there as a sailor. That year, he registered for compulsory military service but was not called to serve. Jan carried on in his profession as a sailor, which was how he spent the rest of his working life.

On June 3, 1847, Jan married Johanna Adriana Puinbroek in Den Helder. Johanna was born in 1822, in Heinkenszand, Zeeland, far to the south. Her parents were Johannes Puinbroek and Maria Theresia Letens. What brought Johanna’s family north to Den Helder is unclear, but her marriage to Jan firmly rooted her there. Together, Jan and Johanna had one child, my Gx2 Grandfather, Cornelis Jan Bakker, born on April 26, 1855, in Den Helder.

Sadly, Jan’s life was cut short. He died on November 13, 1859, at the age of 40, in Den Helder. His widow, Johanna, lived on for more than two decades after his death, passing away in 1881, at age 58. I have no idea as to how he died, but I’ve wondered whether it occurred as a result of his work as a sailor given how young he was at the time. However, I’ve found nothing in any of the sources I’ve consulted, including the online newspaper collections at Delpher and various Dutch archives.

52W Mark IV – Week 17: Card K4 Cornelis Jan Bakker

Cornelis Jan Bakker was born on April 26, 1855 in Den Helder, Noord Holland, the only son of Jan Cornelis Bakker and Johanna Adriana Puinbroek. Cornelis was only four when his father died. While Johanna remarried to a man named Pieter Dekker when Cornelis was six, the death of his father must have undoubtedly must have left a mark on his life. He remained an only child, as Johanna and Pieter never had any children that I could find.

Cornelis’s birth registration (Civil Register for Den Helder)

Cornelis spent his life in Den Helder, a port city in the north-west corner of the Netherlands and home of the Netherlands’ primary naval base for centuries. In 1875, Cornelis registered for mandatory military service in Den Helder but never served. The register shows that he was exempted from service because he was an only child.

Military Register showing Cornelis’s enrollment for mandatory military service and his exemption from service due to being an only child.

It should come as no surprise that Cornelis had a number of ancestors who were civilian sailors in Den Helder. Cornelis’ father and a maternal uncle were sailors, as were several other direct ancestors, along with his step-father and his father-in-law. In fact, Cornelis’s wife also had many sailors in her lineage.

Cornelis broke with that tradition. Around 1875, Cornelis began his work as a cobbler or a shoemaker, a trade he maintained for nearly four decades, up until his death in 1914. Three of Cornelis’s five sons became shoemakers, although one later gave up the trade to work in a bank.

On September 29, 1881, when he was 26 years old, Cornelis married Christina Ran in Den Helder. Christina was born in Den Helder on February 13, 1858 and, like Cornelis, spent her entire life in that city. Together, Cornelis and Christina had eleven children. While Cornelis and Christina remained rooted in Den Helder their entire lives, several of their children later moved further afield, including my great grandmother Elizabeth Bakker who ended up in Langedijk, about 30 kilometers to the south. Other children ended up in the provinces of Utrecht and Zuid Holland.

Cornelis died on April 6, 1914 at the age of 58 in Den Helder. He was buried in Den Helder, at the Begraafplaats Huisduinen (“Huisduinenen Cemetery”). The cemetery is now also known as Algemene Begraafplaats Den Helder (“General Cemetery of Den Helder”). Huisduinen is a village on the outskirts of Den Helder and was the original settlement centuries ago. When the harbour was built in Den Helder, its growth outpaced the original neighbouring village.

Map showing the location of Cornelis and Christina’s grave at Begraafplaats Huisduinen in Den Helder.

Graves in the Netherlands are usually leased, not purchased, and are routinely cleared after a few decades, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that Cornelis, along with his wife, is still interred in his original resting place! According to the Dutch version of Wikipedia, there are gravestones at Begraafplaats Huisduinen dating back to 1671 and that there are many centuries-old headstones. In fact, in 2023, many of the old graves and headstones were restored and renovated.

“Here rest our dear parents C. J. BAKKER (1855-1914) and CH. RAN (1858-1924)”

If I had known about this when I visited Den Helder many years ago, I would have loved to have visited the site!

*Heldersche Courant*, April 7, 1914, page 3

52W Mark IV – Week 14: Card K1 Adrianus Komen and Elizabeth Bakker

Adrianus Komen (1888 – 1948)
Elizabeth Bakker (1888 – 1976)

It’s the second fiscal quarter of 2025 and time to start the second suit of my Deck of Ancestors. This suit involves my father’s maternal line, starting with his grandparents, Adrianus (“Arie”) Komen (1888 – 1948) and Elizabeth Bakker (1888 – 1976). They were born only a few months apart; Arie was born on May 11 and Elizabeth was born on September 12. They were both 32 when they married and spent 27 wedded years together, but Elizabeth spent more years than that as a widow.

Arie was born in Zuid-Scharwoude, Noord Holland, while Elizabeth was born in Den Helder. I have no idea how they met, as their home towns are 30 kilometers apart – a significant distance at the time. (Heck, it still is for a lot of my Dutch relatives!) Arie spent almost his entire life in Zuid- and Noord-Scharwoude (both part of what was then gemeente Langedijk). In her 20s, Elizabeth worked as a domestic servant. She spent some time in that job in Amsterdam, but from 1918 to when she married in 1921, Elizabeth worked in Den Helder.

First part of the registration of Arie and Elizabeth’s marriage.

It might be that they met during Arie’s military service. The Netherlands used to have mandatory military service. In practice, most conscripts never really served in active duty; rather, it was more like a reserve militia or national guard. In fact, Arie spent his whole life as an agricultural worker.

Arie initially sought an exemption from service due to poor eyesight. On December 24, 1907, the military deemed him fit for service. Arie was assigned to the 4e Regiment Vesting-Artillerie (4th Regiment Fortress Artillery) based out of Den Helder. Like many conscripts, Arie was never in active service, but likely had to report in or attend training from time to time. Perhaps he met Elizabeth during one of those times.

Arie and Elizabeth married on April 7, 1921 in Noord-Scharwoude. (This coming Monday will be their 104th wedding anniversary!) They had seven children together, with my grandmother being the eldest – or so I thought. I was surprised to discover through WieWasWie that Arie and Elizabeth had a daughter one year after they were married, who did not live the day. I doubt my grandmother even knew.

For the first seven years of their marriage, Arie and Elizabeth lived on Dorpstraat in Zuid-Scharwoude. The history of their house is documented in a October 2004 article in Van Otterplaat tot Groenveldsweid (now Otterplaat) magazine:

…the newly married couple Adrianus (Arie) Komen and Elisabeth Bakker moved there, on June 10, 1921 to be precise. Three of their children were born here. The house passed into the hands of Maarten Verweel Voorn in 1928, who lived in the neighboring house (now number 451).

The house on Dorpstraat where Arie and Elizabeth lived, and where my paternal grandmother Christina Komen was born. I saw this house during my first visit to the Netherlands.

They then moved to Pikstraat (now Werfstraat), where they lived together for the next 20 years. Arie died on January 14, 1948. Arie was only 59 years old when he passed away. My father was only a few months old at the time, so he has no recollection of his grandfather. I don’t recall my grandmother ever speaking about her father, but she rarely spoke about the past. To be fair, I never asked her about him, either.

Arie was buried in the parish churchyard of St. Jan de Doper Katholieke Kerk (St. John the Baptist Catholic Church) in Noord-Scharwoude. I’ve been to that cemetery, but his grave is no longer there. Graves in the Netherlands are usually leased, not purchased, and are routinely cleared after a few decades.

Elizabeth remained at the house on Pikstraat and she lived there the rest of her life. She died exactly 28 years after Arie, on January 14, 1976. Her remains were cremated. I don’t know if they were ever interred.

Unlike his grandfather, my father knew his grandmother well. In August 2017, my father and I walked to where his grandmother lived on Werfstraat. My dad told me that when he was a child, the street was a path alongside a canal. It is now a fully-paved street, which might be the reason for the name change from Pikstraat to Werfstraat.

*My father walking in front of his grandparent’s house on Werfstraat in Noord-Scharwoude.*

Elizabeth died when I was in elementary school. While I never met her, Oma Komen was well known to me. She regularly sent us letters, postcards, and – most significantly to us as children – boxes of goodies in time for Sinterklaas. However, at the time, I really didn’t know anything about Sinterklaas. I just thought they were really early Christmas treats.

^{Speculaas, stroopwafels, and chocoladeletters – just some of the treats that Oma Komen would send to us for Sinterklaas!}

Supplemental (April 6, 2025): Isn’t this always the case – within a day of hitting publish (late, as usual!), I found interesting new information.

I discovered that Arie spent some or most of 1918 in Heerlen, Limburg. It is almost as far as you can get from Langedijk (Noordscharwoude and Zuidscharwoude) and still remain in the Netherlands. They are pretty much opposite corners of the country.

The dates during which Arie was in Heerlen are unclear from the Bevolkingsregister (population register). It has has him returning from Heerlen (May 10, 1918) before he departs for Heerlen (August 29, 1918). The record of his return was entered on the register on December 10, 1918. It would make more sense that this was also the date he returned from Heerlen.

It is not clear why Arie went to Heelen. His younger brother, Jacob, spent his later years in Limburg and died in Heerlen in 1938. However, it appears that during the time Arie was in Heerlen, Jacob was in Wijchen, Gelderland, which is significantly further north than Heerlen. However, it may be that by 1918 Jacob was in Limburg. Unfortunately, the relevant population registers aren’t available online. As much as I’d love a trip to the Netherlands, that is not happening anytime soon!

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: