Why I started in the first place…
Genealogy isn’t generally a hobby of people aged below 70 (no offence). And I’m 36 at this time. Why did I start?
The reason is a medical one. My son was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis in 2006 and I wanted to know where the heck that came from. I now know that genealogy wasn’t going to answer that question, but once I was hooked, it didn’t go away…
Cystic Fibrosis is a hereditary disease that only occurs when both parents pass the recessive faulty gene to the child. This disease is most common in caucasian people. one in thirty are carriers. Other races have a much lower incidence of this genetic defect. In a sense, this means that historically the desease must have come into existence after the separation of races…
If one in thirty is a carrier, one in 900 couples are both carriers. one in four of their children will statistically have this disease with half of them being carriers themselves. This means that an average of one in 3600 babies born from Caucasian parents will have CF. In the Netherlands that’s about 55 children yearly.
What does genealogy have to do with this? Well, I needed a way to cope with this diagnosis and searching where it came from helped me deal with it. I was hoping to find higher than average child mortality in families in specific branches of the familytree. And though I have found a number of indications, there’s no way to prove anything. Also the statistics simply fail. Let’s look at that.
If a CF defect exists in a line of the tree, only one in thirty marriages within that tree will have a one in four chance of having a CF-kid. this means that chances to find these kids are slim to say the least. Then there is the simple problem of finding all that information. You’ld need complete families, all the kids, you need the dates. that’s difficult in it’s own right. And with a one in four chance, there might be no CF children or many more than expected…
As little as 60 years ago a child wouldn’t live more than a year so the death would be indicative. However, children could die from polio, dysentherie, cholera, plague and a score of other diseases. Then there are the natural disasters and famines. One needs to correct for these factors that will increase child mortality as well…
I haven’t found a way to analyze all data in the gedcom I created in the meantime that would actually give me pointers to possible families with CF-occurence. In fact, this is really difficult to do. Any pointers you may have are valuable to me!
In the mean time I found out that genealogy research is in fact a nice hobby, very interesting to do and enjoyable in it’s own right. I like to find out what my ancestors were doing and why I am who I am. I like the stories and some of those end up posted here. I hope you’ll enjoy these stories and comment on them.
Please support the Dutch Cystic Fibrosis Foundation http://www.ncfs.nl
Cheers
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In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Conditions and Diseases, Cystic fibrosis, Genetic disorder
How Names Change over Time
- Image via Wikipedia
A name isn’t necessarily the same as time passes. This can be a big hurdle when you’re doing genealogy research. In this post I’ll introduce you to one of these varying name problems I encountered.
When researching my mothers ancestry I found an ancestor with the name Tombroek. In fact: Clasina Dorothea Tombroek. She’s born the first of February of 1820 in Rotterdam. That is not a well known or frequent name. It’s pretty rare. I expected things to be rather easy. Added to that the location, Rotterdam. Rotterdam is a good place to hunt for ancestors. Lot’s of archive material is available online at
Digital Familytree Rotterdam. Soon I found that this particular person was also found under names like Tombrick and Sombroek. Now the search becomes a lot wider. The nice thing about the site I mentioned is that you can actually use combinations of wild-cards to search. Searching for ?ombr*k would yield lots of results. That way you still don’t find all variations. How about Toubroek and Tonbroek?. These names you can find searching for Clasina’s Father Arnoldus.
Arnoldus is married to Elizabeth Poulus. Ahem… Also known as Elisabeth and Elizabetha, and also known as Paulus and Paulis. I’m still trying to figure out her ancestry. The problem could well be that her father’s name was written entirely differently…..All I know is that she’s probably from Kralingen, a place now part of Rotterdam… Any information is very welcome as you can imagine….
Back to the Tombroek story. The grandfather of Clasina is the first one that shows some of the origin of the name. Here one variation is Ten Broek, which means so much as ‘living close to a little stream of water’. His full name? Gerardus (or Gerrit) Tombroek / Ten Broek / Sombroek / Tenbroek / Tonbroek.
The last person I want to mention here is his father. Bernardus Tenbroek, buried August the 3rd of 1782 in Rotterdam. He is also the oldes ancestor I found in this particular part of the tree. And he is the only one is this delineage that only has one spelling variant. (as far as I can tell at this moment…)
Why does this happen? Well, it’s quite easy actually. Most people couldn’t write well so they would say their name when they had to be registered for birth, baptism, marriage or death and burial. The clerk would then write down what he had made of it. Different clerks make different spellings. Apparently these people weren’t very clear in their pronunciation… Once the ‘Burgerlijke Stand’ (civil registration) was introduced, most names froze at the spelling of the time… Still, people with different last names could well be related to each other, and to me…
I hope you liked this post, don’t hesitate to comment.
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My ancient Scottish Heritage.
In: Relative · Tagged with: Canada, Dunfermline, Europe, Fife, Genealogy, Masterton, Netherlands, Rotterdam, Scotland
Relative Who Died in World War II
Many people in Europe will have one or more relatives who died in World War II. I’m no exception. An uncle of my father was one of the unlucky people who was inprisoned for hiding a jewish child. He died in Germany in Hamburg.
I allready knew this story – or at least fragments of it because my father had talked about it a few times. Then a few searches on the internet revealed some more detailed information and I was quite surprised.
I found the site http://www.ogs.nl/ where war graves of casualties from the World War II are listed. And so was my father’s uncle Jacob Antonie Mudde. Even better was the fact that his profession was mentioned, and a picture of his tombstone. I never expected to find that.
I then found http://www.its-arolsen.org/en (international tracing service) where I requested more information. I got a copy of his prisoner card from Camp Vught amongst other things.
He was commited to the concentration camp Herzogenbusch (Vught) on May 19th 1944, was later transfered via Amsterdam to Concentration Camp Neuengamme and died in prison Hamburg on November 12th 1944 at 7 pm from dysentery. They also sent me a copy of his deathdocument (sterbeurkunde).
This way a relative I never knew (Wasn’t born yet) becomes a lot closer. Also the war comes much closer. It may be over 60 years ago that he died, He certainly isn’t forgotten.
Hope you liked this post, don’t hesitate to comment.
WIllem Kossen
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In: Relative · Tagged with: Europe, Germany, History, Internment, World War II
How to search your Dutch Ancestry?
To say it’s simple would be wrong. But there is a lot of information available, even on the internet. Let’s just post a simple step-by-step plan to get you started.
1. Start with you and the things you know. Try to get back at least a 100 years or things will be difficult!
2. The ‘burgelijke stand’ is the registration in the Netherlands of all Dutch citizens. Data about births older than 100 years, Marriages older than 75 years and deaths older than 50 years are public, though not necessarily publicized on the internet. The best tool for searching in the ‘burgelijke stand’ is http://genlias.nl. Though not (by far) complete yet, this will probably help you along quite nicely.
3. Before the ‘burgelijke stand’ was installed by Napoleon in 1811 (few years later in the North of the Netherlands) churches were responsible for registration of people. They would register marriages, baptisms and burials. Many of these records have been digitized and are available on the internet, many have not. This way you will probably be able to go back to the 17th century.
4. before the 17th century the chance your name was written down somewhere was slim unles you ‘were someone’. Nobility and important citizens would be noted somewhere and some records still exist. Note that these records are not necessarily very reliable. Many are available on the internet and it’s quite possible to chase your roots back to the likes of Charlemagne and his ancestry. A good resource for that is http://kareldegrote.nl
5. Note that actually visiting the archives themselves will remain necessary, especially if you want to create a story, rather than a long list of names and dates…
Good luck
Willem Kossen
My name is Kossen
Where to start? Well, myself would be good…. My family name is Kossen. What’s that you say? Yup, Kossen. So what does it mean?
Kossen is in fact similar to Jansen, a common dutch name which means so much as son of Jan, Janszoon – Janszn – Jansen (or janssen). Kossen means son of Kos. Kos isn’t such a common first name as Jan so there are less Kossens as opposed to Jansens. Concluding: It’s a patronym which means ‘named after his/her father’.
Where did the name come from? Well, some discussion is possible here. There are multiple families called Kossen. I assume (and have lots of reason to) that the Dutch Kossen family originates in the province of North Holland. Here Kos is a first name that is quite often used (at least some time ago). The German Kossen family is less clear for me. I don’t have the slightest clue to where they came from. I know that there are a few Kossens in the east of the Netherlands, mainly in the Drenthe and Gronningen provinces that seam to originate from the German family and not from the Dutch one. I cannot prove a relationship between the two families and I tend to assume there isn’t one.
My ultimate ancester is Gerrit Corneliszn Coszn born 1645 in Wieringerwaard, North Holland, the Netherlands.
I hope you liked this post and comment on it. If you have contributions, don’t hesitate to contact me!
Kind regards,
Willem Kossen
What am I going to do?
Well, A new blog, so this question is appropriate. What am I going to do with a blog about genealogy?
Here’s the idea i had: I have allready done quite some genea-research so I have a file, a large one to be precise. In that file there is a load of information of which some is really boring. Amongst all that ‘stuff’ there are a number of gems. Pieces of data that actually tell a story (or allow a story to be told.). I’ll post stories from my genea-database here. It’s ‘related-history’ or ‘family-specific-trivia’ if you like. However, the stories will be common for many our histories indeed. Your history, their history, our history.
So do respond if you want, do contribute if you can, do enjoy if that’s you.
Cheers
Willem Kossen
Hello world!
Let’s create a blog about genealogy…. It’s my hobby, so I must be able to write at least something about it????
Cappucino would be nice!
