Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Tangled Webs in Nijkerk

Looking back at my posts in this blog, I haven't done one of these drop charts in almost two years. First, it takes a bit of work to create one of these charts. But also, I haven't found much in the way of tangled inter-relationships in my research. About a year ago, I signed up with Ancestry and spent some time on the German side of my family. However, the records for Mecklenburg-Schwerin on Ancestry only go back as far as 1876, and so I soon exhausted their resources. Later, I spent a few months researching distant cousins in the Achterhoek region of Gelderland, but without finding very many tangles.

But once done there, I turned my sights back to Nijkerk, where many of my ancestors lived. My great grandfather Gerrit Moll (1849-1929) was the first Moll born in Nijkerk, but his wife Geertje Beukers and most of her ancestors lived in the town for generations.


This chart explores the inter-relationships between my ancestors and a couple of other families, in particular, the van den Pol family and the van Dronkelaar family. In this chart, ancestors are marked in red. Blue indicates other blood relatives. (It may help to open the image in a new tab or window.) 


Let's start at the left side of the chart. We see my second cousins three times removed Wouter van Werkhoven (1823-1891) and Rengertje van den Pol (1840-1918) married respectively to Evertje van Dronkelaar (1838-1912) and Wolbertus van Dronkelaar (1845-1922). Wouter and Rengertje were first cousins, and so were Evertje and Wolbertus.

The rest of the chart is more complicated. There are five cases of a distant cousin married to a member of the van den Pol family, all descendants of Jacob van den Pol (1770-1860) and Aaltje Koppen (1781-1865):

  1. Gerrit van den Pol (1807-1877) and my first cousin four times removed Aaltje van Werkhoven (1804-1853), married 1939.
  2. Gijsbert van den Pol (1824-1893) and my second cousin three times removed Aaltje van Woudenberg (1821-1897), married 1848.
  3. My second great granduncle Lubbert Beukers (1822-1896) and Hendrina van den Pol (1824-1877), married 1850.
  4. My third cousin twice removed Evert van den Pol (1851-1938) and my great grandaunt Antje Beukers (1853-1934), married 1883.
  5. Jacob van den Pol (1826-1913) and my second cousin three times removed Geurtje van Woudenberg (1823-1885), married 1848,

It is interesting that, although there are many tangled inter-relationships in this chart, there is only one case of cosanguineous marriage, between second cousins once removed Evert van den Pol and Antje Beukers. Their common ancestors are Evert Teunissen and Aaltje Aalts, at the top of this chart.

I'm not done with this area of research, and so there may be more interesting tangles to discover.

Cheers! Hans