Here are some details about four families. Two were from the Netherlands, one originally from Norway, and one orginally from Germany. |
| Brentjes
Although I, Jacob Brentjes, was bred,
born and weaned in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the original Brentjes name and family
probably came from Germany, somewhere in the Rheinland district, north of Cologne. I say
"probably" because this is only my theory based on what we know today. |
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| We have details about ancestors of
Maria van Meurs that date back to about 1625. She was one of seven
children born to Peter and Fijke. She had a previous sister by the same
name who died the year Maria was born. This is tragic, but was quite
common in those days. A couple lost a child, then named a subsequent one
by the same first name. Some of them were poor people; made a living off the
land and did odd jobs for farmers and others who helped them. Some of
them relied on the poorhouse for food and work. Yet, others became
well to do citizens with at least a couple of town mayors. However, none
that we know of came from the nobility class.
I have included some details about
Varik and the original church records that reveal some interesting moments dated anno 1681.
Johannes Sr. (aka Joannes and Johannis) Brentjes was a bit of a mystery. I have seen the original church and civil records of the birth and marriages of his children, but none show where and when Johannes Sr. was born. He was Catholic whereas Maria belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. Johannes had a brother Mathijs and sister Ida, who were witnesses when two of the children were baptized in the Catholic Church. But, apparently, neither sibling lived close by (and maybe not even in the Netherlands). The couple met and were "married" in Zaltbommel, a city along the Rhine that was very prosperous as a trading post for boats coming and going up the river to Germany. We have no record of their marriage nor of the birth/baptism of their first child, Zeerus. But here is where my "theory" starts. |
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Johannes came from Buederich, an old town in
Germany, right along the Rhine.
The
distance to Zaltbommel is about sixty miles. History of the town, and
its larger sister Wesel across the river, indicates that this was a
major trade center between Cologne and Amsterdam. Boats would regularly
ply the waters and Johannes could have been one of the deck hands. In
1793, Johannes jumped ship in Zaltbommel. He met Maria and the rest is
history. Why Buederich? A number of years ago I looked up the name Brentjes in the German telephone book and found several people who all lived in the Rheinland district, which is along the Rhine, just east of the Netherlands. One professor, Butchard Brentjes, at the University of Berlin wrote me that indeed he also came from the area near Bonn. An other individual, Wenzel, wrote me about all the Brentjes families who lived in Buederich when Napoleon destroyed the town in 1813. More recently I found in church records of several towns in the area that, during the period from 1600 to 1880, all persons with the spelling Brentjes came from Büderich or Wesel. |
| I emphasize 'spelling' because there have
been several different ways. First of all, the name has no specific
meaning. It is not like 'Butler' or 'Johnson'. Being from Holland I
always thought it meant 'little brent' because of the 'jes' ending. Now
it seems that there were (and still are) Brentjens, Brentges,
Brentss and a few others. In fact, one family from
Rheinberg, Germany, used Brentjes for the baptismal of one child,
Brendgen for another and Brentges for a third one. This
was all around 1780. Keep in mind that these people were often
illiterate and the priests who recorded the information did not always
write very clearly. Hence, unusual names got messed up. Back in those days people did not move and resettle very often. So, in Buederich, for example, we can look at the names and dates realizing that they were very likely to be all related. The earliest record was in 1674 for a Joannes Brentjes born to Henrici Brentjes. This was followed in 1690 by Gerardus Brendts, Anna Maria Brenss in 1710 and finally Antonius Brentjes in 1714. After that the name remained as we have it now. Does anyone know better? We would surely like to hear from you. By the way, I know that there are many Brentjens families in Limburg, the southern Provence of the Netherlands. Again some have 'adopted' or are referred to as Brentjes. One is a famous bicyclists Bart Brentjens. It seems that they are descendants of Hijndrici Brentjens who was born in 1728. Did his ancestors come from the Rheinland also? I do not know, but like to think that we are somehow related. See part of the Brentjes family tree in graphical format. Back to top of the page. |
| Hulskamp
a.k.a Hülskamp
a.k.a
Huelskamp
Sharon's paternal ancestors also came from Germany. The name in Germany is spelled with the umlaut above the 'u'. However, here we use both of the versions seen above. Sharon's grandfather John Henry is the boy far right. He, his sister and brother are in the front row of this photograph that was taken when their mother remarried to William Dickmeyer. The three above them were Willam's children by an earlier marriage. They all became good friends. |
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| The father of the Huelskamp children, Alois,
was also a bit of a mystery. We have not found any records of his birth
or death but are fairly sure that he was a child of Franz Heinrich
Huelskamp and Theresia Kachelmeier. The couple were married June 2, 1859
in Mankato, Minnesota and apparently Alois was their first of many
children. There are no records of any other Hulskamp families in the
southern part of Minnesota during this period. Franz came to the US from Heesen, a small town in Westphalia, north of the Rhine. His mother was Angela Johanna Hülskamp, born in 1802, apparently of higher social status than her husband Johann Tharmann; hence she carried the family name. Franz' wife Theresia Kachelmeier was born in Vollmau, a small town in Austria. She had come to the US in 1856 with her parents Joseph Kachelmeier (b. 1807)and mother Catherine Glasser, both from Austria. And that is as far back as we now know. |
| Above is a family picture with John
Henry (third from left), his wife Elizabeth, their children with spouses
and grandkids. Sharon is the little one with curly hair. Elizabeth was a
Tompkins with roots in Ireland, which explains Sharon's feisty outcries.
An interesting side line is that Elizabeth's sister, Hazel, married a fellow with a family tree that can be traced back more than 1500 years. You will have to go to the charts (4F, 4G and 8E) to see how this came about. Chart 8E, in particular, shows numerous names of kings, queens, dukes, etc. from all over Europe. It even includes Lady Godiva and four passengers on the Mayflower. (click here to see). See part of the Hulskamp family tree in graphical format. Back to top of the page. |
| Berge
a.k.a
Hill
This stern looking lady, with her piercing blue or grey eyes, was Agatha Larsdatter Heltne, the wife of Paul Torbjornson Berge. She was born in 1824 along the shore of Lusterfjorden, one of the most beautiful fjords in Norway. The couple emigrated to the US in 1867 along with many relatives and friends. Six of their children came along as they settled in Wisconsin. One of those, Arne Paul Berge, married Agatha Johannesdatter Ness. And, naturally, one of their children produced and led to what we have now; our Hill family. "Why Hill and not Berge," you ask. Before we answer that, let's go back in time and try to see what the old country was like. |
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| Paul was born the 27th January, 1821, on the Berge farm in Fortun, Norway. This small town, north-east of Bergen, is at the end of a long fjord, surrounded by steep mountains that plunge into the fjord leaving little room for farming. Travel was mostly by boat. The scenery here is spectacular; but when you have to scrape up a living on poor soil with a growing family on tiny plots of land, scenery is secondary. |
| Most ancestors of the Berge family were tenant farmers. They were known as "husmenn". In return for living and working a small section of land, they were obligated to work two or three weeks out of the year for the owner of the property. In addition, most had secondary jobs. For example, Paul's father, Torbjorn, was a musician who played the violin at weddings and other festivities. Paul became a tailor. Life was harsh and food not always plentiful. Winters could be severe with snow and ice hampering growing crops and limiting the number of life-stock they could maintain. Large families were common. Hence, the size of farming plots slowly diminished as the tenancy was split up. It was time to consider "emigration". |
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Paul Torbjornson
married Agatha Larsdatter in the Fortun "stave
church", now a national landmark that dates back to 1130 A.D. Presumably
many more relatives before them had done the same thing. Thanks to the Norwegian
historian Lars E. Oyane, our family records go back to about the middle
of the 16th century. I must add here that genealogical research in Norway can become very confusing. During this era a "surname" was often the name of the farm, village or town where the person was born. When baptized, they were given a first name, the second name referred to the father, such as ".....son" or "....datter". (See names above). The last name, however, could be totally different than that of the parents. For the same reason there could be several families with the same last name: Berge, for instance. Berge simply means low mountain or big hill. So now you can see the connection when the Berge family came to America and changed the name to Hill. |
| On April 22, 1867, the sailing ship Claus Heftye left Bergen with 476 emigrants who were to find a new home in America. The Berge family and 98 others from the Luster area had sold their furniture and other belongings, said goodbye to friends and relatives who stayed behind, and traveled by boat to the port in Bergen where they boarded the Claus Heftye, a square rigged sailing ship that would be their temporary home for the next thirty days. Paul's brother, Lars, almost didn't make it. He had gone to Bergen alone and arrived at the dock only minutes before departure. |
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The Claus Heftye was constructed in 1848, at Bath, Maine. It was commissioned the "George F. Patten", named after its builder, and later sold to a Norwegian company during the US Civil War days. That's where it entered the emigration business while returning from Canada with lumber for the English market. |
| Other than a few extra days spent
during a calm off the coast of Newfoundland, the passage to the St.
Lawrence River was uneventful. They arrived in Quebec on May 28, 1867.
Their destination was Stoughton, Wisconsin, where friends had urged them
to come and settle. This part of the trip took another seven days. First
by steamer up the river to Montreal, then by train to La Chine, another
boat trip across Lake Ontario, and more travel by land to reach their
new home. It was in Stoughton that Paul and Agatha's last child, Anna
Susan, was born.
Arne Paul and his older brother Torbjorn (now called Thomas) took on the surname Hill, while their father continued to use Berge and even Thorbjorn as his last name. When Arne turned 21 (22 perhaps) he left his father's farm and moved west to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he worked as an engineer in a flour mill. This is where he met and married twenty-four year old Agatha Johannesdatter Ness. In 1882 she had left her little village Nes(s) located along the same Norwegian fjord where Arne came from. At age nineteen, she had arrived in America by herself and eventually found work as a cook in a Grand Forks hotel. The couple relocated several times but finally settled in Revere, Minnesota, where Arne bought and operated a Ford garage for many years. Sharon's mother was born in Revere and has many fond memories of her youth there. See part of the Hill family tree in graphical format. Back to top of the page. |
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"Referencing the
part that may be inherited by my daughter Janneken Jacobs, and her
alone and not her husband Pieter Adriaense: After my death, he is
not allowed to claim nor sell any without consent of Janneken
herself. Should Janneken die before me without children, the estate
shall remain in my possession. If she should have children, the
estate will pass on to them as described above. Pieter Adriaense may
not have any benefit from it."
Clearly Pieter was not Emmeken's favorite son-in-law. |
| To clarify: Emmeken was a widow of Jacob and had a daughter Janneken before she married Eeuwout and had more children by him. Notice again that the "surname" refers to the father; e.g. Cornelis-daughter and Adriaen-son. Considering these were common folks with little or no real property in their names, it is easy to loose track of who is who. Fortunately we have "Eeuwou(d)t", which literally means "century old", as one of our first Westdorp ancestors. Did any one in his family reach the ripe-old-age of 100? We don't know. In other documents he was referred to as Eeuwout Cornelisse Teekenburg. And we do know that a tiny community in Zeeland was called Teekenburg. |
| Zeeland is one of the eleven provinces in the Netherlands; North- and South Holland are two more, and these three form the western boundary to the North Sea. For the most part, the two Holland provinces are protected from the sea by large, long sand dunes. Zeeland, however, has too many islands and inlets and Mother Nature has played havoc more than once with the poor people living there. They struggled, they rebuilt and kept trying to regain the fruitful land from the sea. No wonder that the regional flag shows the waves and the national lion hald submerged, fighting the water. The motto is: "luctor et emergo", Latin for "I struggle and I emerge". |
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| To appreciate a bit more what this means, consider the two maps below. One shows the various islands as they existed in the 17th century (an artist's conception, to be sure) while the second was taken from a road map of the 1990's. Notice the Belgian city Antwerpen (Hantwerpen) along the river Schelde in the lower right hand corner. The location of Teekenburg is shown with a red circle on both maps. If you are interested to see a clearer version in PDF format, click here for the old map and here for the road map.. |
| During the last few hundred years,
more dikes were built, more land reclaimed; yet in 1953 the largest
flood in five centuries took place and inundated large sections of
Zeeland. Including the area just east of Teekenburg. So the struggle
continued for the inhabitants. Eeuwout and his wife Emmeken were farmers; so were most of their descendants for many years. The soil was rich and water was plentiful; so various crops such as grain and fruit trees were planted. When times were good, so were the farmer's families. But there was always the question, "When will the dikes break again?" Four generations later, sometime around 1650, the family name Westdorp was recorded and stuck. Since than we have details about numerous ancestors including the Westdorps that bought and operated a windmill near Teekenburg, north of the village Schore. It was a 'standaard' or post mill used to mill grain. The reason for the post is so that the blades, including the building, could be rotated to account for shifting wind directions. Before I knew of this Westdorp history, I had built a model of such a windmill (click here to see some pictures). Return to Varik pictures. |
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Notice the woman in the picture
above. She was wearing a white skirt and large lace cap. It was the
costume worn by Protestant women of Zuid Beverland. Here is a doll with much more detail of the dress, cap and finery. The wings and buttons next to the head were gold and the necklace beads of corral. It was typical of what my grandmother (and her predecessors) wore when going to church on Sunday. My mother was born in Kloetinge, the village east of Goes.
See part of the Westdorp family tree in graphical format. |
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Gradus, son of Johannes Jr. with one of his grandsons.
Top
row: Henry, Alma and Annie Dickmeyer,
Bottom row: Mary, Alois and John Henry Huelskamp