Category: misc

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An odd Wikipedia reference led me to the source of my name as well as mid 16th century ancestry.

Last week I wrote about the search where my first name Anton came from, beyond being named after my maternal grandfather Anton Arnold Bast (1903-1969). I concluded it came from my grandfather’s great uncle, Anton Link who lived from 1803 to 1881.
I also mentioned that finding anything further away than the early 1800s was likely impossible, because, as my father was told when he searched in the 1980s/1990s, the relevant archives in Germany were destroyed during WWII.

The various Basts from 1800-1850 I found in public archives and my namesake Anton Link were born, lived, married, and died in the German village Ransbach, although they also lived, married and died in the Netherlands during those same years.
Ransbach is a small village, between 1000 and 2000 people in 1800-1850, in the old County Nassau in current Germany. It has a Wikipedia page, mostly on account of being old (at least mid 14th century), and having a history of producing ceramics. The Wikipedia page is unremarkable, but one line caught my eye. A single reference under ‘Literature’ to Horst Theisen: Ortsfamilienbuch Ransbach-Baumbach 1550-1930. 2. Bände. Weißenthurm: Cardamina 2019; ISBN 978-3-86424-469-8. Ortsfamilienbuch, means book of family names in the village, and the title suggests it goes back to 1550? Would it have more information on my maternal ancestry? A content overview online even stated that it included people who had moved from Ransbach to the Netherlands.

The publisher has a website, with an online shop with books of local names for many German communities. So I ordered the book, almost 1400 pages in two A4 sized tomes, and took delivery of it yesterday.


A long list of names from a small village.

It is based on local church records (mostly the catholic church), from the mid 17th century onwards, the civic register from 1818 onwards, and builds on tax records and court records for the period 1550-1723. The latter come from the state and federal archives in Koblenz and Wiesbaden (not Cologne where my father inquired). The information for people who moved between Ransbach and Netherlands, or settled there, is based on the same online public archives I already consulted myself, making it easy for me to find the right ancestors in this book of local family names.

For my grandfather’s ancestors the book adds more details, such as exact dates of birth, marriage and death that the Dutch archives didn’t have. It also provides details on one more generation back in time. Born around 1750 they were the ones who came to settle in Ransbach, so the book doesn’t provide further details than that.

And then there is the information of my original namesake Anton Link. His parents, Hermann Link (1771-1844) and Anna Maria Bleyer (no dates) are listed as ‘wandering around Ransbach’ so apparently living rough, despite having 6 kids. His paternal grandfather and further paternal and maternal ancestors however are traceable much further into time, and seemed to have been wealthy enough to leave documented traces. All the way back to 1575, with fascinating glimpses of their lives from tax and court documents. Mentions of building and selling homes, a fistfight at a wedding, being listed as having 2 horses, a fine for grazing their cows on a field without permission of the land owner, renting a kiln to bake pottery, lending and claiming back sums of money or owing them.
No further Antons though, just this single one in the Link ancestry.

So there’s me, named after my grandfather who was born in 1903, in turn named after his great uncle born a century before him in 1803. And no Antons before or in between.

The church records in the Ransbach book provide the key. As mentioned Ransbach was predominantly catholic, and the church not just registered parents but also godparents. Anton Link’s godmother Anna Elisabeth Bleyer probably is his mother’s sister. And his godfather, who seems to be her fiancee at that moment is named Anton Hirtenjohann, born in Heinsberg around 1775. Curiously if I look for Anton Link’s godfather and godmother, despite not finding immediate evidence, I do come across a mention of both first and last names in the right decade as a married couple, where Anton Hirtenjohann is seemingly listed as Anton Arnold Hirtenjohann. Previously I concluded that my and my grandfather’s second name Arnold comes from somewhere unknown (no other Arnolds I came across at all, and Anton Link was named only Anton), yet here Anton and Arnold are again used together. If Anton Link’s godfather is the source of both my first names, I wonder what stories carried those two names forward in the Bast family for well over a century?

More exploration is perhaps in order around my second name, with uncertain outcomes. But I find it amazing already that all of this was traceable from home.

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Where does my first name (Anton) come from? This weekend I explored the public archives a bit. Thanks to open data efforts, these days a lot of public archives are online and made fully searchable. The trigger was a conversation with Y about first names and being named after someone else (Y’s second name is after her maternal grandmother, her third name after E’s great-aunt).

I was fully named after my mother’s father, Anton Arnold Bast, who died in 1969, the year before I was born (as an unplanned consequence of a late night tumble returning home from an after summer party). But where did he get his name from? The paternal side of that branch of the family is filled with men named Peter or Jacob, but no other Anton. It also doesn’t come from his mother’s side. My mom (b. 1937) was named after her grandmother (b. 1864), and she after her grandmother (b. 1803) where the archive trail ends. No other Anton there either.

Tracing the lines in the archives back down the generations, I found no clues. Many Peters, many Jacobs, large families, probably poor: one family I came across had 15 children, of which only 5 survived into adulthood. Names being re-used several times within one household. My grandfather had 7 brothers and sisters. Of the eight siblings just four lived to adulthood. My great uncle, whom I remember well, was the second of his name in the household: his brother of the same name had died the year before at less than 3 weeks old.

When I searched for ‘Anton Arnold Bast’ I only found my grandfather, who was born in 1903 in Viersen, Germany (it seems his parents worked there for a few years in the textile industry before returning to the textile mills in Enschede, Netherlands).
Searching for ‘Anton Bast’ yielded some more results. This probably means that my grandfather’s (and my) first and second names come from different sources. The Arnold came from somewhere else.

Another Anton Bast I found was born near the end of 1900, around the same time as my grandfather (1903). This suggested to me there would be a shared Anton somewhere. But at first I did not know what the connection or distance was between this 1900 Anton, and my grandfather from 1903. Wading through the various mentions of yet more Peters and Jacobs I realised that the paternal grandfathers (named Peter, b 1817, and Jacob b 1825, of course) of both Antons were brothers. There are no Antons before then, and there was one Anton (an uncle of the ‘1900 Anton’) who died an infant in 1857. Still not clear where the ‘original’ Anton got introduced in the Bast family, but I now had the precise generation where the name seems to have emerged.

I took a look at those two brothers, and if they had other siblings. They did, a sister Maria Anna Bast (1807-1882). Following her trail I found the ‘original’ Anton: her husband. She was married to Anton Link, born 1803, died 1881.
The infant Anton from 1857 was named after his uncle, and the 1900 Anton and my grandfather in 1903 were both named after the same man, their great uncle. The 1900 Anton had a son called Anton Bast too, born in 1929. He was still alive in 1960 and living in Hilversum, evidenced by a letter he wrote to find out the fate of one of his two brothers, both named Jacob. One, a monk, died 1941 in a monastery near Brussels, according to his brother of causes unrelated to the war. The other was still missing in 1960, although I found a mention later without any context that he had died in 1944. This 1929 Anton may well have had a son or have a grandson also named Anton. The archives don’t mention anything (because the closer we get to our times the less public material is: births after 100 yrs, marriages after 75 years, deaths after 50 years) Yet, there still is an Anton Bast out there according to LinkedIn, and he seems around my age, so perhaps a grandchild like I am?

My grandfather was called Toon, as short form of Anton. This implies the German pronunciation, with a long o sound. I had long assumed that was because he himself was born in Germany, while his parents worked in Viersen for a few years. I’m called Ton, with a short o, the Dutch pronunciation. The 1857 infant Anton was mentioned in the records as Antoon, the Dutch spelling of a long o. This implies the German pronunciation has nothing to do with where my grandfather was born.

Indeed Anton Link, the likely source of my first name, was born in Germany himself. All the Bast’s of that generation and their partners were too. And their father Peter Bast and mother Anna Catharina Schellenpols were too, at the very end of the 18th century. The Dutch civil servants weren’t very good at spelling German place names or personal names it seems, with various spellings for each, but their origins center around the village of Ransbach, close to Montabaur, part of the independent German statelet County of Nassau in the first half of the 19th century.

Their children are sometimes born in Ransbach, sometimes in Hilversum or Den Bosch, alternating within a generation until the 1840s. Around that time it appears the family settled in Hilversum for good. Many of the men and women are listed as ‘koopman’ and ‘koopvrouw’, merchants. The back and forth in the first half of the 19th century between the Nassau region in Germany and Hilversum seems to support the story I heard from my mother that the Bast family were originally pedlars, going back and forth between Nassau and the Netherlands. Further back than the start of the 19th century the traces all end. My father at one point explored further, but the Nassau archives of that period had been moved to the city Cologne and were destroyed along with much of the city during World War II, he was told. Later, decades after my dad’s search, in 2009 the modern day Cologne city archive collapsed due to works on an underground station underneath it. They are still working to restore documents and will be for decades. So whatever might be around won’t be available online.



Zittende marskramer / seated pedlar, drawing/acquarel attributed to Pieter Marinus van de Laar, dated 1834-1862, public domain image, collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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After being informed about the intention of the Royal Library to archive my website, I wondered how some of the aspects my site has may affect what is being collected.
Specifically:

  • Most of my postings are kept away from the front page but end up in specific categories. These postings do show up in monthly archives and overview pages like for a tag or category.
  • Some of my postings are unlisted in the site, yet are publicly available. Mostly these are postings I originally only shared through RSS, such as my week notes. They are not in overviews, don’t show up as search results, but have public URLs, and you can navigate to them if you click next / previous post on their surrounding posts in the timeline.

The crawler that will be used for the archiving is Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive itself.
A quick test of some posts from both of the two types above shows they are likely not in the internet archive. I mailed the Royal Library to ask how Heritrix may or may not deal with my site’s quirks. Or perhaps I can generate a complete site map and make that available?

I think I’ll put this up on the front page 😉

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Although it’s January, and nominally the middle of the school year, a new ‘back to school’ photo is warranted.
Y starts in group 7 today, skipping a year at the half way mark. She started in group 6 after the summer, and is now moving to group 7. After the coming summer she will move to the final year of primary school in group 8. In the past two weeks she did the middle-of-year tests of both group 6 and 7, and already spent some hours in her new group to get used to the change. She asked us to make a new first day of school photo today.

Child getting on a bike

Going to school the first day in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.

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Today is Koppermaandag in the Netherlands, ‘cupping monday’. The first Monday after 6 January, when graphics artists and printers show their skills by making something: a Koppermaandag print.

Traditionally, since the early 1400s, Koppermaandag was the day that members of all guilds would have a festive day for the new year. ‘Kopperen’ (‘cupping’) as a verb comes from kop (cup) and stands for feasting and drinking. The tradition waned in the 18th century with the dissolution of the guilds, and only the printers kept doing it, until that too faded. Since World War II several groups of graphics artists and printers have taken up the tradition again. That is how I know of it: E’s great-uncle was a member of the Groninger group of artists De Ploeg and in 1962 a founder of the Grafisch Centrum Groningen. There they made their Koppermaandag prints. The 1965 print was drawn by him and shows him flattened under the printing press.

Last June during a workshop for Y’s birthday with Roy Scholten in the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum I saw their Koppermaandag prints. The next day I marked Koppermaandag 2026 in my calendar, with the intention of doing something for it by myself.

For me knowledge work has always been artisanal in nature. It is a form of professional work where your tools are personal, where your path is your own. Autonomy within networks, learning in networks, creating in and with networks. This makes personal knowledge plus your approach to maintaining it and learning important (usually dubbed personal knowledge management, or pkm). Having your own system for your personal knowledge is both what allows you to create your professional autonomy (your insights woven into connections that have meaning for you), and what ensures your continued professional autonomy (you take it with you when you go someplace else).

For today I wanted to combine those things. Knowledge work as artisanal profession. This links it back to the original guilds. Second the personal aspect of it, and third making something by hand to print, like the card I made (be)for(e) Christmas. The latter links it to the modern Koppermaandag tradition of graphics printers and artists.

I made a card, with the text (P)KM and the number 26. KM for Koppermaandag as well as for Knowledge Management and the P for personal. My personal koppermaandag, and personal knowledge management. The background is a network. The nodes are concepts, things, actors. The connections between them are the insights that grew from combining them, forming a neighbourhood and context for each node. Something I associate both with Bruno Latour‘s ANT and George Siemens‘ connectivism. The frame around it is not closed, and some connections cross it, because while always defined and bounded in each moment a personal knowledge network is not enclosed nor stagnant.

The design I cut in lino, in what must be the first time since primary school. Then I printed it on our small press. The letters and the lines are wonky. That does make it an accurate demonstration of my capabilities though, as per the tradition of Koppermaandag.

Happy (personal) Koppermaandag!