Tag: Dutch Reformed

52W Mark V – Week 27: Maijke Jans Kuiter

Maijke Jans Kuiter (1787-1824)

Returning from the Dutch mainland to Texel, this week we meet my Great x4 Grandmother Maijke Jans Kuiter. For the longest time I had her name as Marijke, a name I am familiar with. However, after revisiting the documents with some squinting and magnification, I realized that her name was most commonly recorded as Maijke. However, the registration of her baptism identifed her as Maaijke, while the registration of her death names her as Maike. It seems that the letter A comes and goes as it pleases.

Maijke was most likely born in late November or the very start of December 1787 to Jan Dirksz Kuiter, a sailor, and Janke Alberts. Maijke was baptised on December 2, 1787 in Oosterend, Texel. The witness was her father’s sister, Antje Dirks Kuijter.

Church register documenting Maijke’s baptism.

While Mijke married a Mennonite, I initially suspected that she might have been Roman Catholic, because she was baptised as an infant. However, having found the correct church register, I learned that Maijke was baptised in the Dutch Reformed Church. Of course, they simply called it the Reformed Church.

Maijke was the second of three children, although I have to wonder if she had other siblings. While Maijke was about 18 months younger than her older sister, Martje, she was 16 years older than her younger brother, Dirk. It does seem odd for there to be such a gap in births, but not impossible. Dirk may have been a very unexpected surprise.

I have yet to discover anything about Maijke’s life in the twelve years after her brother was born. Her twenties are essentially unknown to me. It is not until she married Cornelis Dirksz Bakker at Texel on April 25, 1815 that I have any record of her again. Maijke was 28 years old, which for that time seems to be late in life for a first marriage. Nevertheless, I have not found any record suggesting that Maijke had been previously married at the time she wed Cornelis.

The signatures at the end of the registration of Maijke and Cornelis’s marriage. While I always value the information I can gather from this kind of document, my favourite part is seeing the signatures of my ancestors.

While Maijke was Reformed and Cornelis was Mennonite, I don’t know whether they married in either church, or at all. In 1811, during the time it occupied the Netherlands, the French Empire under Napoleon instituted mandatory civil marriage before a religious ceremony could occur. So while my knowledge of Maijke’s early life is based on church registers, her marriage to Cornelis is documented in a civil register, with no indication of religion.

I have found some church registers that cover the period after civil registration was instituted, but none that include Maijke and Cornelis’s marriage. Maijke had two children with Cornelis, Naantje (born a few months after her parents’ marriage) and Jan (my Great x3 Grandfather, born in 1819). Any record of their baptisms would, of course, identify the religion in which they were raised. However, I was unable to find any entries for their baptisms in the few church registers I could access. Whatever Jan’s religion, he married a Roman Catholic, and his descendants were all Catholic.

Unfortunately, Maijke died young, on January 4, 1824, when she was only 37. Her children were ages eight and four at the time. She was survived by Cornelis, who remarried.

Registration of Maijke’s death in the civil register.

An oddity about Maijke’s death registration is that the declarant who registered her death was not her husband Cornelis. Rather, it was a Maarten Jacobs Bakker, who is identified as her “zwager” (brother-in-law). However, I have no evidence that Cornelis had a brother named Maarten. Moreover, Cornelis’s patronymic was Jansz, while Maarten’s was Jacobs, which suggests the two men had different fathers and were not siblings. I have considered that at the time, “zwager” had a broader meaning than “brother-in-law” and could be any male relative by marriage, but I cannot find any Maarten Bakker who might have been related to Maijke or Cornelis.

52W Mark V – Week 22: Jan Teunisz de Waard

Jan Teunisz de Waard (1787-1863)

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.

Extract from the Baptism Register of the Reformed Congregation for Texel, showing the entry for Jan, baptized on February 8, 1787.

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.

Huwelijksafkondiging (Civil Marriage Announcement, similar to a Banns of Marriage, for Jan and Cornelia. The excerpt at the top shows the Imperial French administrative division that included Texel, being the Department of Zuyderzée, Arrondissement Alkmaar. Notice that the title page was in French but the entry was in Dutch.

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.

Death registration for Jan de Waard
  • 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.