Since I was a kid, I always thought that “Teunisz de Waard” was one of the coolest names in my family tree, such as my Gx4 Grandfather, Jan Teunisz de Waard, and his father, Teunis Arisz de Waard. Of the two, I think my Gx5 Grandfather had the cooler name.
Jan de Waard was born on February 7, 1787 in Oudeschild, Texel, Noord Holland, to Teunis de Waard and Guurtje Cornelis Buijsekool. Jan was the middle of five children.
Jan is unusual amongst my direct Dutch ancestors. Almost all of them were Roman Catholic, but Jan and his parents were Dutch Reformed. Even more unusual for my tree, recently 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, 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. Anyhow, more on Cornelis later, as he will be the subject of Week 28.
While Jan was Protestant, his wife, Cornelia Kooij, was Roman Catholic. While such a mixed marriage is not a big deal in any way these days, I have to wonder how socially controversial their union might have been. The Netherlands has always had significant Catholic and Protestant populations, but relations were always tense. In the mid to late 19th century, the “pillarization” of Dutch society occurred, resulting in the growth of separate institutions for each religious group. This meant there were separate schools, hospitals, newspapers, shops, banks, trade unions, political parties, social clubs, sporting clubs, and a host of other organizations and associations for Catholics and Protestants. Social interaction between each pillar was discouraged or frowned upon. The social separation did not begin to break down until the 1960s.
I don’t know if Jan and Cornelia were married in a Catholic or Protestant church. They were married on October 10, 1813 – two years after civil registration was introduced into the Netherlands and in the final month of French rule under Napoleon. At the time, the government made all the churches turn in their birth, marriage, and death registers, which formed the foundation of the new system. Since then, the only legal form of marriage in the Netherlands is one conducted by a civil registrar. If you want to have a church marriage, by law you have to have the civil ceremony first. Thus it’s common for a couple to have two wedding dates, but the anniversary is generally marked by the date of the civil ceremony.
This means that the only records I have been able to find for Jan and Cornelia’s marriage are the ones in the civil register. The 1830 census showed that Jan was Protestant and Cornelia was Catholic. All their children, except the eldest, were recorded as Catholic. The bevolkingsregister (population register) for Texel for 1840 shows that Jan was still Protestant while Cornelia and all the children were Catholic. However, the bevolkingsregister for 1850-1859 states that he was Catholic. Whether or not Jan actually converted, I cannot say.
Jan lived his entire life in Oudeschild. In his twenties and thirties, he worked as a labourer. However, by 1830, he had become a shopkeeper. It was the occupation he held until he died on April 18, 1863.
- TIL: So I discovered why my images almost never centre even when I set the alignment to centre. Turns out it’s a feature, not a bug. I learned that the template I’ve been using for the last four and a half years is designed with a left-aligned content column and a right sidebar. Images are centred within the content column, but the content column itself is offset to the left to make room for the sidebar. As a result, large images don’t appear centred across the entire page, they’re centred only within the main content area. I can change the template, which fixes the centering problem, but it causes other formatting problems to arise. So I’m going to leave things as they are for now. Maybe someday I’ll find a template that works, but it’s hardly a (Word)pressing matter for now.