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