Category: Genealogy

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

 

Whenever I add an in-law to my database, I usually do some additional checking on that person. Using WieWasWie, it doesn’t take long to make a rough sketch of someone’s pedigree. Occasionally, I find a connection to some existing person in my database. That seems to happen more and more these days. That’s probably inevitable since I’ve recently surpassed 14,000 individuals in my database!

Today’s chart overlaps another chart I did about four years ago, mapping out some Tangled Webs in Nijkerk. In that chart, I noted that I had connections to three children of Jacob van den Pol and Aaltje Koppen. More recently, I’ve found an additional three children with connections to my distant cousins. (It may help to open this chart in a new browser window.)

In this chart, red indicates my ancestors, blue indicates other blood relatives, and yellow indicates the family of Jacob van den Pol and Aaltje Koppen. Not shown are other children of Jacob and Aaltje that have no connections.

First, consider Cornelis van den Pol (1800-1885). Two of his children, Hendrina and Jacob married distant cousins Lubbert Beukers and Geurtje Woudenberg (respectively).

Next, Jan van den Pol (1805-1879) had a daughter, Aaltje, who married distant cousin Mathijs van der Heiden. This was the second marriage for Mathijs. He’ll come up again in a few paragraphs.

Gerrit van den Pol (1807-1877) married blood relative Aaltje van Werkhoven.

Johannes van den Pol (1811-1890) had a grand-daughter who married my second cousin twice removed Geertrui van de Bunt.

Arend van den Pol (1813-1879) was the father of Margrietje, first wife of Mathijs van der Heiden, mentioned before.

Finally, Gijsbert van den Pol (1824-1893) married my second cousin three times removed Aaltje van Woudenberg. Their son Evert married another distant cousin, Antje Beukers.

At the top of the chart, note the two people, Jan Koppen and Klaas Koppen. They lived in Nijkerk at the same time, one married in 1780, the other in 1785. It’s perhaps not unreasonable to assume that they might be brothers. However, so far, I can find no evidence linking them together.

Cheers! Hans

 

 

Now and then, I go back through my genealogy database looking for things I’ve missed before. A few weeks ago, I came across a first cousin five times removed, Catharina Mol. All I had on her was her date of birth, March 31, 1776, in Velp (Gelderland). This was surprising since much of the information I had on the Moll’s came from research published by the single-name society Genealogische Vereeniging “Mol(l)” back in the 1930’s. (You can find their publications on-line here.)

Most of their data was fairly complete, so seeing someone with just a date of birth was conspicuous. These days, research is a lot easier, and so it didn’t take long to figure out what happened with her. Catharina moved away from Velp to Echteld, a village about 35km to the east, situated on the Waal. There she married Peter van Beem, a planter. Research on their descendants turned up some interesting interrelationships.

In this drop chart, the people marked in blue are my distant cousins. If you look carefully, you can find three examples of two siblings marrying two siblings. In particular, note the two brothers Lubbartus Mol van Beem (1803-1875) and Peter van Beem (1806-1884) married to the two sisters Aartje van Setten (1816-1875) and Cuinera van Setten (1814-1882).

There are also three examples of marriage between first cousins. This was not uncommon back in those days. However, for the first time in my own research, after recording information on over 13,000 individuals, I found a case of a marriage between first cousins who also happened to be double cousins, Peter van Beem (1832-1901) and Elizabeth van Beem (1852-1901), married in 1890. That is, these two shared four grand-parents. Before this, the closest I got was a case where the bride and groom shared three grand-parents.

These days, laws regarding cousins marrying vary considerably from place to place. According to one web site, North Carolina allows first cousins to marry, but not double first cousins. According to another web site, almost half of all marriages in Afghanistan are cosanguineous. Of those, almost 7% are double cousin marriages.

Anyways, research on this branch of the family continues.

Cheers! Hans

 

 

Occasionally, I go back through my ancestors to see if I’ve missed anything. For the Dutch side of my ancestry, I think I’ve gone back about as I can go along all of the lines. But I still hope to be surprised.

A few weeks ago, I came across a 5th great grandmother, Rijkje van Assenraade, who lived in Amersfoort during the 1700’s. If she was born there, then surely there should be a baptism record. The WieWasWie index is steadily improving, and I was pleased to find a baptism record for Rijkje, dated 1733.

Searching through the Amersfoort church records, I soon came across another baptism dated five years later:

I also found a burial record for a child of Wijnand van Assenraade dated 1734. Through a process of elimination, I was able to conclude that that burial record referred to the Rijkje born in 1733.

So now I had names for two new 6th great grandparents, Wijnandt van Assenraade and Hendrikje van Willikhuize. Going back further is turning out to be a challenge. From their marriage record, Hendrikje was from Nijkerk. However, there’s no sign of her in the Nijkerk church records. Also, the name van Assenraade doesn’t seem to occur any earlier than the 1730’s. So more work is needed to extend the pedigree further.

However, my search through the Amersfoort baptisms turned up a few siblings of Rijkje, one of whom, Jan van Assenraade (1732-1810) also survived into adulthood, married, and had children. Going down that line turned up some interesting people. Which brings me around to the topic of this post, using Wikipedia as a source.

One of the children of Jan van Assenraade was Wijnand van Assenraad (1764-1855). In the death record for his wife, Hendrina van Uijttenhoven (1766-1838), the occupation of Wijnand was listed as Burgemeester. Now then, most people in my database were just regular folk, such as farmers or workers, and rarely get mentioned anywhere outside the church records or civil registration. However, for some people, it’s always worth doing a web search. Someone as important as a mayor is likely to be mentioned elsewhere, and sure enough, a search found some information in Wikipedia, as well as a picture.

Going down another line, I discovered a few more distant cousins mentioned in Wikipedia, my 3rd cousins 4 times removed, the composers Johannes Albertus van Eijken (1823-1868) and Gerrit Isak van Eijken (1832-1879). That was three Wikipedia relatives found in one day!

All together now, out of the more than 13,000 people in my database, 25 of them have their own Wikipedia pages. While it obviously can’t be relied on for most people, it can be a useful resource for the more famous (or infamous) people in our databases.

I’ll end this missive with a list of the Wikipedia people in my database:

• Herman François Hesselink van Suchtelen (1852-1934), mayor of Wageningen.
• Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926), physicist, Nobel Prize recipient (4th cousin, twice removed).
• Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928), physicist, Nobel Prize recipient (2nd cousin, twice removed).
• Geertruida de Haas-Lorentz (1885-1973), physicist (3rd cousin once removed).
• Wander Johannes de Haas (1878-1960), physicist.
• Elisabeth Keers-Laseur (1890-1997), Nazi collaborator (5th cousin, twice removed).
• Cornelis Jan (Cees) Laseur (1899-1960), actor, director (5th cousin twice removed).
• Harm Kamerlingh Onnes (1893-1985), artist (5th cousin once removed).
• Floris Verster (1861-1927), artist.
• Menso Kamerlingh Onnes (1860-1925), artist (4th cousin twice removed).
• Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkamp (1874-1950), writer, architect, explorer (6th cousin once removed).
• Lindor Serrurier (1846-1901), anthopologist (4th cousin 3 times removed).
• Cornelia Serrurier (1879-1962), professor (5th cousin twice removed).
• Iwan Serrurier (1878-1953), electrical engineer, inventor of the moviola (5th cousin twice removed).
• Mark Serrurier (1904-1988), engineer, Academy Award recipient (6th cousin once removed).
• Herman van der Kloot Meijburg (1875-1961), architect.
• Mary Dresselhuys (1907-2004), actress.
• Merel Laseur (1934-), journalist (6th cousin once removed).
• Petra Laseur (1939-), actress (6th cousin once removed).
• Martin Veltman (1928-1995), poet.
• Loek de Levita (1930-2004), television producer.
• Tiemen Brouwer (1916-1977), politician (4th cousin once removed).
• Wijnand van Assenraad (1764-1855), mayor of Amersfoort (1st cousin 6 times removed).
• Gerrit Jan van Eijken (1832-1879), composer (3rd cousin 4 times removed).
• Jan Albert van Eijken (1823-1868), composer (3rd cousin 4 times removed).

Just to emphasize the point, it never hurts to do a web search on names you come across in your research. You never know what it will turn up.

Cheers! Hans

p.s. After publishing this tome, I realized one famous artist was missing from the list. I checked, and found that while Evert Moll (1878-1955, 4th cousin 3 times removed) is listed in a Wikipedia page of painters, he does not (yet) have his own Wikipedia page.