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

When I started doing genealogy 30 years ago, I started recording my pedigree on an “IBM Programming and Charting Worksheet”, a sheet of paper 11″ x 15½” in size, lined with half-inch squares. Back in the dinosaur days of programming, sheets like these were used to document programs using flowcharts. By 1990, that was already long considered an obsolete programming technique. But I still had a pad of these worksheets. And for the past 30 years, I’ve steadily maintained this chart.

Here’s the Dutch side of my pedigree. Over the past few years, I haven’t had much chance to update it. Generally, I had thought I had reached the limit of records available on-line for each ancestral line. However, over the past week, I’ve been able to add six previously undiscovered ancestors to my pedigree. Four are indicated in green on that picture. (There’s no room on that page for the other two.)

Lena van Hagen

So about a week ago, I thought I’d have another go at pushing back my ancestry, starting with my 4th great grandmother Lena van Hagen. I knew she lived in Nijkerk in the mid to late 1700’s. But I couldn’t find her baptism record. Using the usual arsenal of on-line tools (WieWasWie.nl, FamilySearch.org, and GeldersArchief.nl), I now decided on a different tack. I looked for marriage records in the early 1700’s for people named “van Hagen”. I came up with two marriages. The first, dated 1740, didn’t match. After marrying, that couple moved to Harderwijk and had a number of children, none of whom were named “Lena”.

The second turned out more successful. Early in 1744, Arent van Hagen married Anna Maas in Nijkerk. I then found a baptism record dated 4 months later for Lena, daughter of Arent Cornelissen and Annetjen Maas. All together, I found 5 baptisms for children of Arent and Anna. Although the marriage listed Arent by his surname “van Hagen”, every other record refers to him by his patronymic “Cornelissen”.

This evidence isn’t the greatest. I’ve seen cases before of people referred to by either surname or patronymic in different records. In some cases, I have found records that included both, which added confidence to my conclusions. I wish the evidence here was better. But I’m still adding Arent van Hagen and Anna Maas as two 5th great grandparents, and will look for more evidence to support that conclusion.

Heintje Wouters

The next brick wall I looked at was my 4th great grandmother Heintje Wouters (also known as Hendrikje Wouters). Unfortunately, there’s no progress to report on that front. She lived in the village of Hoevelaken, and I haven’t found any church records covering when she was born. Maybe she was baptized in neighboring Nijkerk? If so, I would run into another problem since there was another Hendrikje Wouters alive at roughly the same time, living in Nijkerk. At some point, I will make another attempt to attack this roadblock.

Weimptje Dirks

Which brings me to my 4th great grandmother Weimptje Dirks. Before, I couldn’t go further back with her since FamilySearch did not have the church records for the town of Ede, where she was born. Well, FamilySearch isn’t the only game in town. With a bit of digging, I found the Ede church books on the GeldersArchief web site, and quickly found her baptism, dated 1760. Her parents were Dirk Jurrijsze and Lijsbeth Evertsze, my 5th great grandparents. Plodding through the baptism records, I found another 10 children in the family. Of the 11 kids, only two reached adulthood.

Could I go back further? I couldn’t find a marriage record in Ede for Dirk and Lijsbeth (also known as Elizabeth). I had a hunch I’d find it in the neighboring village of Lunteren. At first I resisted looking there since as far as I could tell I had no good reason to. But I still did, and there I found their marriage record dated 1758. That record indicated that Dirk, or Derck, was born in Renkum. Then, in the Renkum church books, I found a matching baptism record. Derck was baptized in 1726 with parents Jurjie Janssen and Anna Gijsberts, my 6th great grandparents.

In conclusion, I’ll make a couple of points. First, it never hurts to go back and revisit those brick walls. The indexes are always improving and more and more historical records are being added to the various web sites.

Second, trying to come up with definitive conclusions when going through the pre-1811 Dutch church records is rarely easy. In all of these cases listed here, I wish the evidence was better. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s at least good enough to record and use as a base for further research.

When I was learning genealogy 30 years ago, the recommended practice was to record a fact first in pencil. Once you had three corroborating pieces of evidence, you could then go back and retrace the fact in pen. It’s just bloody hard to reach that level of confidence reading those old Dutch church books.

Cheers! Hans

 

About a decade ago I resumed my genealogy research. I started using the program Gramps since there were not a lot of options available for Linux users. Gramps is a powerful, full-featured program, available for Windows and Mac, in addition to Linux. But it can take some getting used to. In this essay, I’ll offer some hints and walk you through the process of adding some information to your Gramps database.

One of the first things to do after installing Gramps is to set the base path for your media files. Gramps does not save image files in its own database. Instead, it saves the filenames to the image files on your computer. By default, Gramps will save the filename to an image as a full path. However, it’s better to save the file name as a relative path. But first, you’ll need to set the base path in the Gramps Preferences. On the main toolbar, click on “Edit”, then “Preferences…”. Then set the path in the entry field “Base path for relative media paths”. In my case, it’s “/home/hans/family/gramps-media”.

The first thing I always do when starting up Gramps is to open the clipboard window. This is where you can drag and drop any item, such as a person, source, citation, or place.

My screen then looks like this:

In this picture, the clipboard is already populated with a couple of places, a source, and a citation. The relationship view is where you do most of your work. And at the right is a gramplet pane showing a gramplet that I’m currently programming. A gramplet is an extension to the program adding some functionality. (Programming gramplets is a topic better left to brave souls with experience in programming.)

Let’s look at the relationship view in more detail. The buttons can be a bit confusing, but moving the mouse over an icon shows what it does. If in doubt, check that help text before continuing.

The icons are consistent throughout the program. The plus-sign always indicates creating a new item. The pencil icon indicates editing an item. And the finger-pointing icon always indicates adding some existing item to some other item. (I’ll let you figure out what the minus-sign icon is for.)

To illustrate my usual workflow, let’s update an event for an existing person, in this case, Hendrik Krasenberg. Click on the edit icon for the person, and we get this:

In the events, double click on the birth record. Or alternatively, right-click, then click on “Edit”.

Note that we already know that Hendrik Krasenberg was born around 1848. Using WieWasWie, we look up the birth record in the Dutch civil registration. In FamilySearch.org, we find this document, which I’ve edited and saved on my computer as “1848 Hendrij Krasenberg birth.jpg” in folder “family/gramps-media/records13”:

So in the Event Reference Editor, I enter the new date of “1848-03-13”, which I immediately select and copy (ctrl-A, ctrl-C). I’ll need to paste that date a few times during the next few steps. We then drag and drop the place name, Rheden in this case, from the Clipboard to the Place.

The next step is to create a new citation for this birth record. We already have a source in the clipboard.  Click on the “Source Citations” tab, and then drag and drop the “Netherlands, Gelderland Civil Registration” item from the Clipboard to the Source Citations window. We then get the “New Citation” window with the Source already filled in. Note that a citation always requires a source.

Click on the date field and press ctrl-V to paste in the date. For Volume/Page, enter “Rheden 1848 #34”. It can be whatever you want, but best to adopt a consistent standard throughout your work. Then click on the “Gallery” tab, then on the plus icon to create a new media record: You’ll then get this dialog:

One important hint on this dialog. Make sure the “Convert to a relative path” box is checked. Otherwise, the full path will be saved. (Remember, the first thing we did after installing Gramps was to set the base path.) After selecting the right file, press OK to continue. In my case, I view the files in reversed modified order, and so the file I normally want is usually the one at the top of the list. You then get the Media Reference Editor dialog. Expand the “Shared Information” and we see:

Note that the title is automatically filled in from the filename. I usually paste in the date before pressing OK. I then press OK on the New Citation dialog, and the citation gets added to the event. Then, I drag and drop the newly created citation to the clipboard since I’ll need it for adding additional information to other people. Press OK, and we’re then back to the Person dialog for Hendrik Krasenberg, and we see the updated birth record.

Where do we go from here? Before we press OK on this person, we check the birth record again. If we want to add this event to another person’s events, we can drag and drop the event to the clipboard. For example, perhaps a witness to the event is already in our database. We can drag and drop the Birth event into that person’s events, and give them a role of “witness” to the event. The Dutch birth records usually include the age and occupation of the witnesses, and so we can add those facts as well, using the citation we just created and saved in the clipboard. Actually, the information we started off with for Hendrik Krasenberg was based on the fact that he was a witness to the wedding of his sister.

Normally, Dutch birth records in the civil registration include some additional facts about the father and mother. In this case, we know that the father, “Jan Derk Krasenberg” had occupation Timmerman, or carpenter, and that he was 44 years old at the time of his son’s birth. In addition, the mother, Everdina Hermina Hupkes, was 30 years old. We can update the records for both of those people, again, using the citation we just created.

Note that when adding events to a person, the events are not sorted by default. If you want the events in order, you’ll have to manually move the event to its proper place. You can either use the up and down arrow buttons, or you can drag the event to another location in the list.

There’s a lot more to Gramps than this. I’ve already written a thousand words on the subject, and I could easily write a thousand more and still only scratch the surface. But hopefully, this will help you get started on the right path with Gramps.

Cheers! Hans

Out of my 28 first cousins, I have two cousins, sisters, who married two brothers. Double in-law marriage is not very common these days since we all now have a large pool of potential spouses to choose from. But in the case of my two cousins, the tradition in that family was to marry within their church, a conservative Protestant denomination. That’s an example of endogamy, the practice of marrying within a specific social group, caste, or ethnic group.

In the past, however, choice of potential spouses was much more limited, especially in small isolated communities. In my genealogy database, I have numerous examples of double in-law marriage, as well as at least one case of triple in-law marriage. However, up until now, I hadn’t come across a case of quadruple in-law marriage.

As usual, blue indicates distant cousins. Consider some of the children of Aris van Manen (1779-1863) and some of the children of Johann Heinrich Ostermann. We have four van Manen siblings married to four Ostermann siblings. That is, a case of quadruple in-law marriage.

This raises a lot of questions. The van Manen’s were born in the village of Velp, and most stayed there. Although Velp is a small village, it is not isolated, being very close to the city of Arnhem. On the other hand, the Ostermann’s were from a small village about 60km to the south-east, in the neighboring Kingdom of Prussia. The parents, Johann Heinrich Ostermann and Wilhelmina Kamps remained in the village of Ringenberg, while four of their children moved, most to Velp, one to Arnhem, to live with their van Manen spouse.

Perhaps Johann Ostermann had reason to visit Arnhem in his position as an official in the post office. (In one record, he is listed as a Postdirecteur.) By the mid 19th Century, a railroad line had already been built connecting a major industrial heartland of Prussia with the commercial centers and seaports of the Netherlands. By rail, the trip between Wesel (the closest large town to Ringenberg) and Arnhem would have taken about an hour. Since the post office was a major customer of the railways, and since Arnhem is the first major city across the border, it’s not unreasonable to expect that Johann would have to do business in Arnhem. However, we may never know the details of how four of Johann’s children connected with the van Manen siblings.

This drop chart has a few more interesting features. First, consider the marriage between Aris van Manen (1858-1901) and Wilhelmina van Manen (1866-1946). This is just the second instance of double first cousin marriage in my database. The first, between Peter van Beem and Elizabeth van Beem, I found almost a year ago.

There are also two cases of regular (not double) first cousin marriage, between Willem van Manen (1827-1899) and Hermina Aleida de Bruin (1826-1902), and between Jacobus Petrus Felix (1861-1938) and Wilhelmina Henriette van Manen (1861-1928). Also, Hendrik van Manen (1854-1909) and Johanna Harmina Schut (1853-1921) were fifth cousins once removed, although their full ancestries are not shown in the chart.

One more unusual situation in this drop chart. Consider the Arnhem winkelier Jacobus Petrus Felix (1801-1875). He married twice, first in 1826 to Petronella de Bruin (1789-1854), and second in 1855 to Hermina van Manen (1825-1899). Hermina was Petronella’s niece.

That’s quite the handful of tangled interrelationships!

It’s a fact that we’re all related to each other. However, some people are more closely related than others. This post describes another case of complex interrelationships between two people. In particular, let’s look at how Hendrik Bernard Wentink (1904-1957) and Johanna Geerlings (1906-1991) were related to each other.

(As in previous posts, you might find it useful to open the chart in another browser window. People marked in red are ancestors of mine, those in blue are distant cousins.)

Hendrik Bernard and Johanna were married 1930 in Rheden. Likewise, most of the people in this chart lived in the area around Rheden, east of Arnhem, in the Dutch province of Gelderland.

When looking at a marriage record, I often do a search on their parents and grand-parents to see if any of them are already in my database. Doing so, I quickly realized that Hendrik Bernard and Johanna were 2nd cousins once removed, with common ancestors Gerrit Brinkhorst (1766-1831) and Paulina Petronella Dieterink (1768-1831).

I also realized that they both had van Zadelhoff ancestors. Mapping out their ancestors took a bit of effort since their common ancestors were quite a few generations back, well into the 17th Century. Johanna had a single path back to Steven Berends van Sadelhof and Hendrina Willems. But Hendrik Bernard’s ancestry was much more complicated. His parents, Jan Hendrik Wentink (1873-1946) and Hendrika Wentink (1873-1934) were first cousins. Likewise, both sets of his grand-parents were also cousins, paternally 1st cousins once removed, maternally 3rd cousins.

So there were three distinct paths from Hendrik Bernard to Steven Berends van Sadelhof. So along that side of the chart, Hendrik Bernard and Johanna are 6th cousins twice removed in two ways and also 7th cousins.

We’re not done yet. Once I noticed that both had Kets ancestors, I had to investigate further. So it turned out that Hendrik Bernard and Johanna had another pair of common ancestors, Gerrit Kets and Jantje Geurts. As before, there are three distinct paths from Hendrik Bernard to Gerrit Kets, resulting in relationships of 4th cousins once removed and 4th cousins twice removed.

Finally, we come to another pair of common ancestors, Hendrik Brinkhorst and Catharina Turgels. From this pair, Hendrik Bernard and Johanna were 5th cousins.

If you’re keeping track, we have a total of eight different sets of distinct paths from this married couple to their four pairs of common ancestors.

Cheers! Hans

When we upgraded our home internet to high-speed broadband a few years ago, I hoped to update the genealogy data on my web site more often. With our old 2Mbps internet, it could take hours to upload the data. With a fiber optic connection, uploading a 4.4GB tarball takes about 10 minutes. That said, a few weeks ago I noticed that I hadn’t updated the information in more than two years! So I figured it was about time to do an upgrade.

One change I made for this version is a different photo on the home page. Since the site is called “Boldts and Molls”, I thought it appropriate to have a photo with both Boldts and Molls. This photo taken on April 7, 1956 is perhaps the only one I have with my parents and all four grand-parents. From left to right in the photo, Hans Wilhelm Joachim Boldt, Anna Paula Alwina Hermine Ludwigs, Ernst Ludwig Boldt, Johanna Maria Moll, Gerrit Moll, and Johanna Maria van de Bunt.

As a general rule, I try to include full birth, marriage, and death data for all of my blood relatives, including where possible scans of the original source documents. I also apply this standard to the spouses of blood relatives. However, when I find interesting inter-relationships between various in-law families, I often go further to map out these inter-relationships. As my database grows, finding such connections is becoming more and more common. Check the Genealogy category of this blog, and you’ll find a number of example of such connections.

I also include some data for some of my in-law aunts and uncles, in particular, for those born in the Netherlands: Leen Moraal, Joop van Dyk, Henk Honing, and Diane Luimes. This information is not complete, and in many cases relies on secondary sources. However, for 16 of my 28 first cousins, this can provide at least some information about the other side of their pedigree. And if any of my cousins want to dive in to the hobby of genealogy, this can give them a good head start.

Anyways, click here, or on any of the links mentioned in this post to start exploring the Boldts and Molls.

Cheers! Hans

So I was researching the family of my second cousin five times removed Geurt Kets (1799-1881), who lived in the village of Rozendaal, near Arnhem. I have some ancestors from that village, and it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at those books. As I was adding marriage events for Geurt’s kids, one in-law family caught my interest.

One of Geurt’s daughters, Wilhelmina Cornelia Kets (1827-1895), married Johannes Willem Urselinus Avelingh (1829-1881). His mother was Elsje de Ridder (1797-1823). I saw that surname before, Geurt Kets was married to Aletta de Ridder (1801-1862). If you’ve read my genealogy posts before, you know I just have to investigate to see if there’s a connection.

The first issue was geography. Elsje lived in the village of Amerongen (Utrecht). While Aletta was born in the nearby village of Rhenen, her father Dirk Leksius de Ridder (1771-1871) was born further away in Schalkwijk (Utrecht). However, Dirk’s father Dirk de Ridder (1745-1832) was born in Amerongen, so the possibility of a connection was still very much a possibility. The rest of this post involves people who lived in Amerongen.

Going back through Elsje’s ancestry, I found a couple of interesting things. First, her parents both had surname de Ridder. Could her parents Tieleman de Ridder (1760-1842) and Johanna Wilhelmina Urselina de Ridder (1763-1838) be related?

Second, look at that the names of Elsje’s grandparents. Could Frederik de Ridder (*1730) be related to Otto de Ridder (1736-1820)? And could Elsje Haefkens (*1736) be related to Johanna Arendina Haefkens (*1738)? If they were two pairs of siblings, I would have my second case of a marriage between double first cousins! (You can read about my first case here.)

When I go through the Dutch civil registrations, I sometimes get bored. The indexes (like WieWasWie) are so good, and the information in the records is so detailed, that the research can be too easy sometimes. However, by now I was well into the 18th Century church books of Amerongen, where research can be much more challenging. Those records contain much less information than the civil registration, spelling of names can vary considerably, and the older hand-writing scripts can take some getting used to. As you go further back into the 17th Century records, things get worse.

However, the church records for Amerongen aren’t the worst I’ve seen. It’s not a large place, so you don’t have to read through a lot of pages of records. And to make things easier, there’s an index for baptisms for the years 1655 through 1713. It’s grouped by year, but names are ordered alphabetically within each year.

Still, it took a while to find all the baptisms I was looking for, even after scanning through the expected range of records multiple times. At one point, I resorted to Google searches to try to find the information in secondary on-line sources. Eventually, I did find the records I was looking for. Sometimes it can be easy to miss something even if it’s staring you in the face.

Back to the research, Elsje and Johanna Arendina Haefkens were indeed sisters. Frederik and Otto de Ritter, however, were not brothers, but rather, first cousins. And so the married couple Tieleman De Ridder and Johanna Wilhelmina Urselina de Ridder were double cousins, first cousins maternally, but second cousins paternally.

I’m not done with this in-law family yet, though. I have other people with surname Avelingh in my database. Perhaps I can find additional connections with the family of Hendrikus Avelingh?

Cheers! Hans

A few days ago, I was going through the people in my Gramps database and came across the entry for Ruth Kraaij, with a birth date of “calculated 1819”. I checked and noticed he didn’t have parents recorded. On a hunch, I looked him up on WieWasWie, and quickly found his birth record. I noticed that his parents, Lubbert Riksen Kraaij and Hijntje Rutgers (AKA Hendrikje Rutgers van Schalm) were already entered into my database. Within minutes, I downloaded Ruth’s birth record, updated his birth information, and added him as a child of Lubbert and Hijntje.

When your database grows, as mine has, to the size where you need five digits to count the number of people, there are likely to be at least a few unrecorded relationships like this. In this case, it was a parent-child relationship. But on my desk, I already have four pages of notes outlining more complex relationships between other people already entered in my database.

Here’s a screenshot of the “People” view in my Gramps database. I have it configured to show name, birth date, birth place, death date, spouse, and last changed. I often use the last changed date. By clicking on the column title, Gramps will order the records in that sequence. I then scroll down to the end, where I can see where I ended up in my previous session.

But consider the birth date column. Note a couple of things. First, a birth date in italics is actually a baptism date in those cases where a birth date is not known. Likewise, a death date in italics represents a burial date where date of death is unknown. For births and deaths in the Netherlands prior to 1772, this is very often the case.

A “calculated” date is computed by taking the date of some event and subtracting the age of the person at that event. In Dutch records, the quality of a calculated date can vary considerably. For marriage records, the bride and groom had to submit extracts from their birth records, and so their age at marriage can generally be counted on as accurate. Age at death, on the other hand, can often be off by a few years.

(By the way, when entering a calculated date into Gramps, all you need to type is “calc”. Gramps will fill in the rest.)

Sometimes, I’ll randomly go through my “people” view looking for possible avenues of investigation. The people with a calculated date of birth are often worthy of further study. I’ll look for these individuals in groups of people with the same surname living in the same general area. In my data, I have a lot of people who lived in Nijkerk, and it often takes little effort to link together people already recorded.

In the case of Ruth Kraaij, his daughter Hendrikje married my second cousin three times removed Evert Woudenberg. Ruth’s brother Rik Lubbertsen had a daughter, Aleida. She was the first wife of my great grandfather Manus van de Bunt.

Cheers! Hans

 

Many of us use hand-written notes to keep track of our genealogy research. It’s especially useful as a sort of “to-do” list, to keep track of complex inter-relationships. Normally, I record birth, marriage, and death records just for my blood relatives and their spouses. But if there’s a chain connecting different in-laws, usually I’ll also record information about the people along that chain. Those interconnections can get quite complicated.

In this tome, I discuss how one particular page of notes got complicated quite fast. Here’s how the page started. These are people who lived in the Nijkerk area, most in the area between Nijkerk and Amersfoort. The people marked with a rectangle are blood relatives.

I was looking at the children of Teunis van de Bunt (1860-1927) and Gerritje van den Heuvel (1866-1927). (Teunis was my second cousin three times removed.) My research showed that the spouses of at least four of them had connections to someone already in my database. The chart starts by showing the pedigree of Hendrika Walet (1891-1915), wife of Barend van de Bunt (1888-1970). Of her eight great grandparents, six were already in my database. The other two weren’t, but they were the parents of someone already there.

The chart morphed into this:

I discovered that Barend married a second time, to Maartje van Dunschoten (1894-1893). It turned out that I already had her maternal grandparents, Jan Dijkhuizen and Grietje van Dasler, and that she was a blood relative, my third cousin, twice removed. Oh yeah, Barend and Maartje were third cousins. Their common ancestors were Aart Woutersen and Jannetje Jans, who married in 1778.

Which now brings me to the latest revision of the chart:

There’s a lot more going on here now. Maartje van Dunschoten‘s father, Gerrit, married a second time, to Gerritje van den Brom. Now that was another surname I recognized! It turned out that she was a first cousin once removed of Hendrika Walet.

Back to Gerrit van Dunschoten, his maternal grandparents, Gerrit Willemsen Guliker and Mechteld Aalten van de Bunt were already recorded in my database. Note that in the Nijkerk area, there were two separate, unrelated lines of van de Bunt’s. I’m related to the larger of the two groups. Mechteld was a member of the other, unrelated van de Bunt family.

Going back to Gerrit’s paternal line, I found he was a descendant of yet another couple already in my database, Aelbert Gerrits and Maartje Klaasen. Other descendants of Aelbert and Maartje were married to various other van de Bunt’s.

Will there be more revisions? Probably. I’ve already entered in most of the people on the right side of the page. As I enter in the ancestors of Hendrika Walet, the next item on my to-do list, I’ll probably add more to this chart.

Cheers! Hans