Tag: genealogy

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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.