Another Two Ancestors!

Yesterday, I blogged about finding six previously undiscovered ancestors. I should have waited a few hours. Then, I would have titled the post “Eight Newly Discovered Ancestors”. Rather than update that post, I decided to write a new post about this particular family.

A week ago, all I knew about my 4th great grandmother Weimptje Dirks was her name. I didn’t go any further back since FamilySearch doesn’t have the scans for the church records of Ede, where she was born. But GeldersArchief does have those scans. I was back in business, and quickly found her baptism and the names of her parents. With a bit of digging and some lucky guesswork, I found the baptism records for their parents, the last one shortly after I wrote yesterday’s blog post.

I also found 10 siblings for Weimptje, shown here:

Once I recorded the names of Weimptje’s maternal grandparents, I noticed something interesting. It is not uncommon for children to be named after relatives, especially grandparents. And this family is a great demonstration of this.

Note four children named “Annetje”. Three of them died in infancy, and it appeared that their parents really wanted a child with that name. Sure enough, they were named after their paternal grandmother, Anna Gijsbertz. Likewise, my 4th great grandmother Weimptje was named after her maternal grandmother, Wijmptje Ariens. Going further, it looks like all of the children were named after a grandparent, or great grandparent: Jurrij and Jurrien after their paternal grandfather Jurjien Janssen, Evert and Evertje after their maternal grandfather Evert Eliszen, and Jan and Jantje after their paternal great grandfather.

As far as I’m concerned, namesake naming isn’t really useful as a research tool since it can’t always be counted on. But when you do see it, it can give you a little bit more confidence that you’ve reached the right conclusion.

One more aspect of this family: Apart from the last child Jantjen, all the children were born in the village of Veldhuizen, which is situated just to the west of Ede. I’ve found a number of burial records dated between 1759 and 1774. Two of them I can assign to two Annetje’s because of their names. The situation for the rest of the children is interesting. Of the 10 children born before Jantjen, I have 6 without an established death or burial date, and 7(!) burial records for an unnamed child of Dirk Jurrijsze. (I can narrow down the dates somewhat for most of the kids, but at least for Evertje and Evert, any one of those 7 burial records could apply.)

At this point I can only speculate. If I assume I’ve found all the baptisms and burials for that family in that given time span, why the discrepancy? Note the pattern of births through the 1760’s. Elizabeth Everts gave birth yearly during that time, except for 1765. Coincidentally, there is a burial record that fits nicely within that gap. Is that the burial record for an unbaptized stillborn child? If so, I could assign burial dates for two more of the children, leaving four with four possible burial dates between 1771 and 1774.

At this point, I’m not sure I’m willing to jump to that conclusion.

Cheers! Hans