Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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It turns out that in my previous search for my oldest findable namesake I was barking up literally the wrong tree. I am named after my maternal grandfather (born 1903), and his paternal line has several men named Anton (my first name) in a side branch, originating from his great uncle in 1803 (and his namesake was his godfather it seems). That line however is not also the source of my (and my grandfather’s) second name Arnold.

Trying to extend the ancestral wheel for Y, at first I could not get beyond my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandparents and there were no Anton’s to be found there. His mother’s father was named Johannes (born 1835), and his mother’s maternal grandfather was named Cornelis (born 1796). Not having names of parents in turn makes it hard to find siblings. When I then found the names of Johannes’ parents, Hermanus (born 1794) and Johanna, at first that did not bring an Anton to light either.

Dutch family names have been introduced in the early 1810s under Napoleonic rule. Some families came up with something that connected to their profession, locality, or how they wanted to be adressed (I’ll call myself King, ha! Baker! ‘From Smallville’!) Some thought it would be temporary and done away with after the French rule ended, hence family names like Bornnaked. Some already had a form of family name, e.g. based on the farm they lived at.

The Hermanus born 1794 would have been too young to register a family name, and it would have been his father who did. But his father would have been born around 1750-1775, and if there was a pre-existing family name then the spelling could be fluid over several decades, especially if a family moved around between different municipalities. There also can be differences in spelling between church records and civic records. Indeed it turned out that what settled as the family name Meere, was also written down as Meré, Merée, Marré and Marre describing the same people, dates and events. I also came across Meeze several times, which is more likely a transcription error when records were digitised. That way I found both the 1794 Hermanus’ grandfather also named Hermanus, born around 1740, and a son named Anthonie Arnoldus for both of them. With the spelling of those first names, I could then search out more people with the same name.

Now I do have a clear timeline for my namesake, where previously I thought I did if a tenuous one.

Hermanus Meere (b. ca. 1740) had a son Anthonie Arnoldus (1764-1832). He named one of his sons Anthonie Arnoldus (1799-1865) His other son Hermanus (1794-1845) named one son Johannes (1835-1911), and another Anthonie Arnoldus (1837-1870). Johannes’ daughter Theodora (1864-1950) named her son Anton Arnold (1903-1969, my direct namesake), after her uncle, great uncle, and great grandfather. The spelling of the names changed here, losing their religious connotations. There is a story my mother told me that I connected to her parents, but perhaps is connected to her father’s parents given the change in spelling of names: that the couple came from different religious denominations, and that when both reverend and pastor after the wedding came asking about whether their future children would be registered as part of their flock, they decided it would be neither.

An overview of the Anthonie Arnoldus and one Anthonia Arnolda I could find:

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The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the initials and dates of those who carried the same name. Y is not just named after her maternal grandmother, but she was too, and her maternal grandmother was too. The line stretches back 6 generations to 1817 that way. Y and I followed the trail in the open online archives, and found out that the line actually stretches to one more maternal grandmother as namesake, which gets us to 8 generations and the mid 1700s.
The question where my first name came from brought us to my maternal grandfather, his great uncle, and his godfather.

By then I had quite a bit of information jotted down, and wondered about storing and structuring, or visualising it in some way. As could be expected there is a machine readable data format for genealogical data, GEDCOM. It was created in the 1980s by the Mormon church, for whom tracking genealogy is connected to some of their core beliefs. As such the data format is heavily centered on nuclear families as opposed to individuals and their lineage. GEDCOM is flat text which promises that it can be read by self created parsers. Searching for a genealogical software tool to make data entry easy, there’s no shortage of paid-for online services, and there’s of course the Mormon run FamilySearch. Local software all looks and feels as if it is 20 years or more old. There isn’t much that is FOSS and can run on a present day Mac. I settled on using GRAMPS, a FOSS project originating in 2001, but with the latest release November last year, and available for Mac too. It’s written in Python, uses a database, and exports in GEDCOM and XML, and it seems to have an API too.

I entered the information I already collected, and then started adding from the open online archives. My father in the early 1990s researched mostly paternal lines. Pre-digitally that was somewhat logical and easier. Historic documents are mostly focused on men, and branching families meant having to visit multiple church and civic archives adding quite a lot to the workload. Online archives offer search over transcribed archive documents, and cover the entire country.

It still costs time, but over the course of a few days I’ve been able to identify all of Y’s ancestors 6 generations deep (early 1800s, 64 ancestors in the 6th generation), and partly up to 9 generations deep (512 ancestors). This allows looking back some 300 years to the early 1700s, and in a few rare cases to the 1650s.

The GRAMPS software provided this visualisation of Y’s ancestors as a wheel around her. Y is at the center, each ring reaches another generation back. The light blue ring is the last fully complete one, beyond that I haven’t searched for everything yet, and not everything is available online either. First names of living persons removed.

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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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Favorited Never Blow Up Your Bridges by Wouter Groeneveld

Wouter talks about the weak ties across the years that in hindsight turn out to be key in making a next step, changing course or enter new fields. Never burn bridges he concludes.

I never applied for any of my jobs or roles. At one point I have written some application letters but that never yielded anything, and I learned not to bother with them. Most of the roles I have had didn’t exist before I filled them. My first job I got because my employer saw my volunteer work on a side interest of mine in a different context and asked if he could pay me to do that elsewhere. Then one of their clients hired me to continue some other work inside their own organisation. Another company made a cold sales call to me in that role, but ended up hiring me instead. When I quit my last job, some clients left with me although that wasn’t my doing. I also brought that former employer along to a new client of mine where they then stayed on when I was done. The past two decades of being self employed and then later also an employer myself have been similar. I’ve done high trust complex change projects for people I already knew for years before and had never approached commercially until they reached out. I’ve come to trust that side interests, side activities, conversations and going to fringe events to see who I might meet and what gets discussed there, over time will yield interesting work.

A few years ago I was asked to talk about my ‘career path’ at my old university. Often such talks by others present a linear path created out of clear ambition and goals. Instead I shared that I probably have had half a dozen of conversations in my life that in hindsight turned out to be pivotal in my work. Such as an off-hand remark in a conversation over coffee in Austria that has turned into what is now well over 15 years of work in open data, digital ethics, and data governance. I titled that talk What is it you do again?, as the question pops up regularly. I think the answer has been and is ‘interesting things that happen to cross my path’, and ‘going various places so that more things might cross my path’. Burning bridges is indeed not part of that approach.

Never blow up your bridges. If you manage to build a couple, you can always cross them—and if needed, retrace your steps.

Wouter Groeneveld

It seems to me that LinkedIn is enshittifying their internal search.

In the past weeks I frequently don’t get any results when searching for someone I met inside LinkedIn (the website, or the mobile app). Yet, when I search for them online generally, I get the link to their LinkedIn profile as the very first result.

Another notch against the utility of LinkedIn.

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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.