Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Another Link Between Two Ancestral Lines

In a previous blog posting, I described a rather complex set of tangled interrelationships connecting two of my ancestral lines. In that post, the van de Beerenkamp family provided a link between my Moll and van Coot lines. In this post, I uncover another, albeit less complicated connection.

Lately, I've been recording distant cousins who lived in the province of Utrecht, either in the city of Utrecht or in Amersfoort. In such large communities, I don't expect to find much in the way of tangled interrelationships. And to a great extent, that's exactly what I found. No cousins marrying, no double cousins, etc.


However, when coming across a new family name, I still do a search to check if I've seen that name before. I traced my distant Utrecht cousins down to Gerrit Vink, born 1885 in Utrecht. He married (for a second time) in 1926 to Derkje Dorland, born 1901 in Rheden. I checked the name Dorland in my database, and turned up a few others, including Jacob Dorland. Jacob was a witness to the marriage of his brother Johann Christoffel Dorland and Berendina Moll, in 1884.

(In the above chart, red indicates ancestors, and blue indicates other blood relatives.)

A bit of research revealed that Jacob Dorland was the father of Derkje Dorland. So the Dorland family had a connection to two of my ancestral lines. First to my Moll ancestors, and secondly to my Laseur ancestors, through their Vink descendants. Evert Moll and Geertrui van Donselaar were my 4th great grandparents. Herman Laseur and Bellitje (Peters) Birckhoud were my 6th great grandparents. These two lines converge with my grandparents, Gerrit Moll and Johanna Maria van de Bunt.

So it always pays off to check your database to see if you've come across a particular family before. Likewise, it always pays off to add witnesses of events to your database.

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