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.
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.
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.
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.