Tag: surname

52W Mark IV – Week 13: Card V13 Trijntje Jans(en)

Trijntje Jans (1830-1915)

With Week 13, we have reached the last card of the first suit of this year’s deck of ancestors! I am really enjoying the different approach I have taken with the 52 Ancestors Challenge this year. I thought it might be less work, but as I worked through each card, I realized that my research hadn’t been as thorough or complete as I thought it had been. So I’ve spent much more time researching than writing as part of this year’s challenge. In essence, it has turned into Yvette Hoitink‘s Level-Up Challenge!

My Gx3 Grandmother, Trijntje Jans, is featured in this final card. For decades, I’ve had her entered in my database as “Trijntje Jansen”, with “Jans” as an alternate surname. However, quite recently, I’ve reversed things, and now have “Jans” as Trijntje’s surname with “Jansen” as an alternative.

As anyone who has done genealogy for enough time knows, a fixed consistent spelling of names is a relatively recent thing, so the fluidity of Trijntje’s surname is not surprising.

I first used “Jansen” because it was how I first encountered Trijntje. In the marriage registration for Ariaantje Bleeker, my Gx2 Grandmother and Trijntje’s daughter, Trijntje’s surname was recorded as “Jansen”. It was also entered as “Jansen” in the marriage registration of Ariaantje’s younger sister, Aagje Bleeker.

However, in records specifically about Trijntje herself, her surname was recorded as “Jans”. Most significantly, the name entered in the registration of her birth was “Jans”. Trijntje’s marriage and death registrations also named her as “Jans”. To me, that’s a compelling reason to use “Jans” as her “actual” surname and “Jansen” as the alternate.

So what do all these records tell us?

Trijntje was born on January 4, 1830 in Oude Niedorp, Noord Holland. She was the first of 13 children born to Cornelis Janz Jans(en) and Ariaantje Noordstrand. Fewer than half the children survived infancy or childhood.

Trijntje’s full birth registration

Oddly enough, the youngest of the 13 children was also named Trijntje. The elder Trijntje was 19 years old when her younger namesake was born and was likely still living at home. There are many reasons why parents would give two or more of their children the same name, but I cannot think of any that would have applied in this case.

Trijntje married Jacob Bleeker on May 12, 1855 in Oude Niedorp. Together they had four children. Sometime between the birth of their second and third children (1859 to 1865), Trijntje and Jacob moved to Harenkarspel, Noord Holland. Harenkarspel is about 10 kilometers west of Oude Niedorp. That strikes me as a huge move, given that even today that seems to be a long distance for some of my relatives who live in Noord Holland. I don’t know why they moved. It’s possible there was significant event in their lives, which might go to the five and a half year age gap between their second child, Cornelis, and third child, Adriana (my Gx2 Grandmother).

Jacob died in 1890, when Trijntje was 60 years old. However, she did not remain in Harenkarspel after he died. According to her death registration, Trijntje died in Medemblik, Noord Holland, on November 8, 1915. I do not know when or why she moved to Medemblik, which is on the coast of the Zuiderzee (“South Sea”), a saltwater bay. With the completion of the Afsluitdijk in 1932, the Zuiderzee became a freshwater lake, the IJsselmeer.

This was also a significant move, because Medemblik is almost 30 kilometers east of Harenkarspel and 10 kilometers east of Oude Niedorp. I don’t know of any contemporaneous family who lived in Medemblik at the time that might explain why Trijntje moved there. I will have to check the bevolkingsregisters (population registers) and Trijntje’s FAN club (“Friends, Associates, and Neighbours”) to see if I can solve this mystery.

Trijntje’s death registration.

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.