Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Planning a Trip!
My husband and I decided to decided to travel to Holland. After making this decision, booking the trip, etc., I wanted to research my Dutch roots. My paternal grandfather emigrated to the US from Holland. Unfortunately, there is no one left alive from my parents' or grandparents' generation from my dad's side of the family - the Tunimans. In fact, excluding my mom, a Tuniman by marriage, I am the oldest Tuniman alive from our family!
So, with all the ancestry websites around, and after watching shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?", sponsored by ancestry.com, I decided to try to find out if there are any living relatives out there that we could meet. And I found it's not as easy as tv makes you think! I started out by googling my grandfather's name. This, in itself was a challenge because while I was growing up, it was spelled TUNIMAN. Some time after my grandfather died, we discovered the correct spelling was TUINMAN. I also started a membership with ancestry.com. They had almost no information about him. This was surprising because he lived in the US from about 1915 until his death in 1962. During almost all of that time, he lived in the same house in which my dad grew up, paying taxes, voting, getting married and dying - seems like there should be something with his name on it! So I tested ancestry.com by "searching" for my parents, who spent their entire lives here. I was able to find a census record that listed my mother when she was about 5!! That being said, ancestry.com is pretty much useless!
However, I did find one important piece of information. I found a copy of the Manifest of the ship on which Grandaddy sailed to the United States. There, at the bottom of the page, was his name, Reyndert (as it was spelled) Tuinman, age 24, occupation butcher, able to read and write, most recently living in Amsterdam, father: (unreadable initial) Tuinman, Anna Palowna . I was so excited because I thought I had just read the full name of my great grandmother - Anna Palowna. However, after 30 seconds of research, I discovered that Anna Palowna is NOT a person, but the town where Grandaddy was born!! Now I had a place to start searching!
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Although I already wrote one post today, I am so excited I had to write again! I was just fooling around on my computer googling the name R...
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Way back in August, I wrote about Anna Tuijnman Roomeijer who had a daughter "Beth". Anna was one of my grandfather's sisters...
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I had high hopes that Rosalinde would answer my email! Of course, the email address I had used to write to her was from a couple of years ...
AnonymousAugust 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM
ReplyDeleteI would have gone with Jacob 2.0; what were they thinking!?
Reply
AnonymousAugust 29, 2011 at 5:27 PM
I just reread this post, and figured out AIM is aol IM. I hope this works.
The Dutch had an "order" of how they named their children. First son after father's father (Cornelis) second son after mother's father (Jacob). If a child dies, the first child born after that death was named after that child, that's why you have two Cornelis and two Jacob. The daughters should have been named after the mothers (Trijntje and Naatje). Then they move on to the parents, then brothers and sisters if they have that many kids.
They usually were pretty good at doing this. I think the Norwegians or the Dutch would name their child after their dead spouses, like you should have had a Gretchen in there .
I copied this off a site, she explains it better:
Most Dutch families followed certain customs of child naming. The two eldest sons were named for the grandfathers, the paternal one first unless the maternal one had some distinctive social position, had more money or was deceased. Sometimes the first son was named for the mother's first husband if she were a widow. The two eldest daughters were named for the grandmothers. Some families alternated with the first son being named after the paternal grandfather, the first daughter after the maternal grandmother, but this is not as common. If a child died, almost always the next child of the same sex was given the same name.