Tag: family

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My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a reputation in cattle raising. In his early twenties he had a choice of job offers to run a cattle farm in Argentina and to run a cattle farm in Twente, in the eastern part of the Netherlands. His mother wanted to be able to visit him by train, so the Argentina offer was refused. He worked on the farm Stepelerveld near Haaksbergen, Twente, since its founding in 1928, which was meant as a model farm. It already had mechanised milking from the start for instance. The farm’s owner, Ebs van Heek, son of textile barons, and my grandfather had a strong interest in cattle raising, trying to increase milk production per cow. Before the farm was constructed in 1928 (now a national monument) work had already been underway to bring together and raise cattle for it on a nearby farm. I don’t know when my grandfather was hired exactly, he may already have had some role before the farm’s construction. Cattle was my grandfathers passion. After the farm was sold in 1963 and my grandparents retired to the nearby village Boekelo, there were photos of us grandchildren on the living room dresser right next to similarly framed photos of price winning cows. Central on the mantel piece was a photo of a bull. It remained there for over 30 years.

It may have been the same bull he took a train trip with.

The farm had a locally famous bull, named Adolf (this was the 1920s, so no stigma attached to that name yet). There was a cattle fair in The Hague, on the other side of the country. My grandfather walked the bull to the station, and joined it inside a cattle car, hired for the purpose, for the train ride to The Hague. When he arrived he sent a postcard to the farm, saying ‘gakz’, meaning ‘goed aangekomen, Klaas Zijlstra‘, arrived well. Postage was based on the number of words. This kept it to half a cent. Then he spent three days at the cattle fair on the Malieveld (the largest field in The Hague, used for fairs and demonstrations for some 400 years), where he shared straw with the bull to sleep on in the open air. The bull won first prize. He walked back to the station boarded a cattle car again with the bull for the trip home, and showed up on foot with the bull and a victory cup at the farm.

In the story, the station was sometimes Haaksbergen (the nearest, about an hour’s walk from the farm) sometimes Hengelo station (a 3 hour walk). Although Haaksbergen connected to Hengelo, it was a different station from the one on the line towards The Hague, so it may have been easier to go to Hengelo as they’d otherwise had needed two cattle cars, one for each line. Still, as the railroad company for the Haaksbergen-Hengelo connection was founded and owned by the same textile barons, to connect the factories, it may well have been Haaksbergen, or the also nearby Boekelo on the same line.

As a child I heard the story repeatedly but never really knew when that happened. Thanks to digitised archives I now have more details.

Earlier this week I came across a version of this story online, written by the farm owner’s daughter, and she placed it in 1929. Having a year I then searched the digitised news paper archives for cattle fairs in The Hague, and found it was actually 1928.
In 1928 the Netherlands hosted the Olympics in Amsterdam, from 28 July to 12 August. It was the first edition to be called ‘the summer olympics’. The national cattle fair and exhibition took place just before, from 23 to 25 July, and was dubbed the ‘Olympic cattle fair’ in the press. It was a big event (I found 230 paper articles across the country about it for that week). Opened by two government ministers giving speeches, visited by members of the royal family on each day, the queen mother and the prince consort, though not the queen herself. Prizes were awarded for many different categories of cows, horses, pigs and goats. A special mention in the press talks about a new ‘contraption to measure the pulling strength of a horse’ being demonstrated. Amidst all that was my grandfather, two months before his 23rd birthday, with bull Adolf on a leash. And won first prize.

Which fact ended up in the papers with a photo:

Klaas Zijlstra and the bull, Malieveld 25 July 1928, published in the Utrecht Daily on 27 July 1928, photographer and copyright unknown.

Look at that enormous and muscled beast, coming to shoulder height of my grandfather. And then imagine traveling and sleeping next to it for 5 days!

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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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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.

This week Y celebrated her 6th birthday with her friends. Here they run towards the final programme item, eating at a pancake restaurant. It was her first proper children’s party, as on her 4th she hadn’t entered school yet due to the pandemic schoool closures and her 5th also coincided with a pandemic lockdown.