Fettje II: Family secrets

End station den Hague

Dear Brad,

First I need to correct an error in the earlier post. I had two different years for your great, great-grandmother’s birth — 1889 and 1884. I re-checked the Groningen Archives website and learned that the correct date was 1884. In addition, although my Aunt Betty tells that your great, great grandmother fell in love with a nephew of Miss Lohman’s, further research shows that he was more likely Miss Lohmann’s grand nephew, Bonifacius Christiaan de Savornin Lohman, who was one year older than your great, great grandmother. All of this has now been corrected in last week’s post.

When my cousin Susan and I visited the Netherlands in 2012, we planned to visit Groningen, to look in the genealogical archives there, and Bolsward, which is in the Friesland province, bordering Groningen.

Several years earlier, I had first visited Bolsward and marvelled at the St. Martin Church on the town square, which houses a Heerema family crypt from the 16th century, when the Heeremas were the leading family in the area. We wanted to stay in the Heeremastade (Heerema Estate) in Bolsward, an ancestral home of the Heerema family, which had now been turned into a B & B. Back in the 1960’s, my father and his brothers and their parents had even been notified that we had inherited this estate building but would need to travel to the Netherlands to claim it and be prepared to prove we could repair and renovate it enough to preserve the historical facade. I remember it being discussed, and that quite quickly everyone decided it would be insane to go to the Netherlands and claim the inheritance. I had urged my father to go but, of course, I was only a child.

But the Heeremastade was booked out in June, 2012, so I searched further and found what looked like a very nice little hotel called Het Weeshuis (The Orphanage).¹ It was during our stay in this place that I first learned of the now defunct orphanage system in the Netherlands — where lower class women who had been impregnated by aristocratic men gave up their children.  More synchronicity.

The city museum in Delft describes this period through the late 19^th century and displays a typical wooden road stand which had been placed before one of the orphanages depicting a handsome, blond child in peasant’s attire, holding out his hand onto which an offering plate is welded, with the message: “Give generously, he could be your nephew.”

Generous indeed. 

But, at her birth, my grandmother was neither put in an orphanage, nor did her mother, Fettje, marry the father.

So Fettje was the first one. We can start there anyway, the forbears so numerous and all Friesian on that side. Their origin is traceable to a knob-like high ground a days’ walk north from Groningen. In fact her name, Terpstra, appears to be derived from the west-Frisian word Terp, meaning “an artificial dwelling mound found on the North European Plain that has been created to provide safe ground during storm surges, and sea or river flooding.”² Small safety in the North Sea sand.  A place of mussels, other eons’ skeletons, wind- and water-battered, just a protusion on the plain above the shore; a place not water, barely distinguishable from the sky.  Could only have been discovered during a rare separation of sea and clouds and otherwise not comprehensible as earth, instead inescapable dampness, perpetually on the verge of materializing, clouds as landscape.

Fettje. What a name said the assistant in the hushed refuge of Groningen’s genealogical archives.  We followed him past the rows of blue books -- fine-leathered gold-etched tomes accounting for Dutch aristocracy. If lucky, we would find something on microfiche he suggested, doubtfully, because  we were just fishing in flat murky water, unlikely to find anything prior to Napoleon, upon whose order the Frisians took up surnames, underneath names, for the rulers’ records. They started counting us then but anything beyond Fettje’s great grandfather, named simply Son of Alwen, was not traceable.

From her married name we learned that Fettje espoused Bakker in 1888, when she was 21.  Bakker? A name such that she was probably cleaning toilets for the Crown Prince in the Hague snorted my daughter-in-law of sorts over a century later.  The Snorter’s entire extended family and now my flesh and blood were in all of those blue books, somewhere.  At least the ones whose fathers claimed them.

The marriage record gave her maiden name. „Terpstra“ said my companion cousin. Know plenty of them in Grand Rapids.  Good Frisian name.  But Fettje was no maiden.

From there, we went to the Terpstra records which confirmed that Fettje’s first child,  our paternal grandmother, was born in 1884, when Fettje was seventeen.  Otherwise carefully filled in, the birth certificate is blank after the word „Vater“ but her adoption at the age of four by Bakker was noted as the date of Fettje’s marriage.  The records note her occupation as “servant girl.”

That was the first adoption we know of in our family on grounds of an unknown father.

My grandmother was named „Germbina“. That’s quite a name said the assistant a second time, while my cousin was still frowning after learning that Uncle Corny in Iowa was not our uncle, his children were not our cousins, and the farmer Bakker, who eventually took Fettje and their several children across the Atlantic to the edge of the north American plains, was not really our great-grandfather.

Germbina stayed in the Netherlands. 

Fettje left the knob of a village on the edge of the North Sea and went off to work in the city at 16? Which city? (My grandmother told me she had been in the Hague with her mother during her very early childhood.) Fettje was loose? Fettje was raped? Fettje was in love? Whatever happened, Fettje went home to bear her child in the public of her people apparently quite shamelessly. The baby’s strange name was partly explained when we learned Fettje’s father’s name – Germ.  It was what the Germans call a Verkleinerung of Germ’s name, for a baby who was four years younger than the fourth legitimate child of King Wilhelm II of the Netherlands, whose name, Wilhelmina, was also a Verkleinerung of her father’s name. 

At the time of my grandmother’s conception around early April, 1883, there were only two Princes of the House of Orange. One was the King, who would have been 66 at the time, and the other was his only surviving son, Prince Alexander, who would have been 32. Prince Alexander never married, and he died in June, 1884 of Typhus, the last crown prince of the House of Orange for the next 116 years.

That King had illegitimate children all over the place, explained Mr. de Fries, waving the smoke from his cigarette in its holder out of his face as we sipped a glass of wine together in his pension overlooking the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. He actually recognised the artistocratic ones. Indeed, he was called “the greatest debauchee of his times” and —possessed of a quixotic temperament — polite one day and raging the next.³ The Wikimedia page on him lists his legitimate issue, with the side comment “among others”, and notes that he had “several dozen” children by other mothers. ⁴

It did occur to me that Germ could have been the father but then it would have been not very smart to either keep the child or name her after him. The Terpstras were also devout Christian Reformed churchgoers and part of the Kuyper movement, which was very much for tearing down the class distinctions which kept families like theirs in a feudalistic relationship with the aristocratic landowners, a feudalistic system which essentially condoned sexual relations with the female peasantry, whether consensual or not, while allowing no further “familial” obligations on the part of the aristocracy. Much as it was in times of slavery in the USA.

As my Aunt Betty told it, Grandma Heerema loved her Terpstra grandparents very much. I think that her name was a defiant finger in the direction of the her true father, whoever he was — just as defiant as actually keeping the child, and raising her with love.

We told the assistant in the genealogical archives that our grandmother had worked for Miss Lohman in Groningen.  He immediately knew who we were talking about, since the Lohmans were one of the leading families in Groningen, but he shook his head when we said that she was like a “lady in waiting”.  “Not from that class she wasn’t.  We’ll find her in the servants list, though.”  I marvelled at the record keeping of these people as we followed him into another dark corner of the archive, where we scoured the extensive list of every scullery maid, driver, cook and groom Miss Lohman ever had, but we did not find Germbina Bakker or Terpstra.  The helpful assistant scratched his head again and was clearly not pleased that something was missing in his records.

For some reason, which he did not explain, he suggested that we should look further in archives in Den Hague — the seat of government and of the royal family in the Netherlands.

Susan and I had already booked an AirBnB in den Hague — it was in a fabulous old Bauhaus building from the 1920s, north of the city, with a view to the North Sea from our balcony. I decided very quickly that I could easily live in this very comfortable, if not a bit pricey, city. We immediately visited the city center and rented bikes. Unfortunately, Susan had a bike accident within minutes of our rental. So we spent some time at a local hospital, where her injured arm was treated. We enjoyed visiting Scheveningen, the beach part of Den Hague and visited museums. But we did not go to the genealogical archives there. After we had confirmed part of our Grandmother’s secret — that Bakker was not her father, that her father was unknown — we were hesitant to spend another day in genealogical archives. We didn’t even know where to start because we didn’t have a place of birth or other record which would have originated in den Hague.

My grandmother left the Netherlands forever in May, 1909, when she was 25. She was a passenger on the ship Noordam, departed from Rotterdam. The ship’s records note her last place of residence as “Groningen.” My grandfather, Albert Heerema, aged 23, is also on the passenger list of the Noordam. They were immigrants the likes of which the present day Republican presidential candidate would encourage to come to the USA. But now the USA is a place where the poor and even the middle class are squeezed out of adequate, affordable housing, education and health care; where labor standards and life expectancy are falling; where women are forced to put their children up for adoption because they are destitute and where couples able to pay the $50,000 fee can essentially buy their children.

In the Netherlands and in Germany young people never have to worry about having affordable health care, high-quality public education through graduate degrees at a university essentially free of cost, high-quality, government-regulated child care, at least four weeks paid vacation, extensive job protections, paid maternity leave, parental leave for both parents with job protection, extensive landlord-tenant protection. The list could go on. Unless they are billionaires themselves, young Europeans are not going to be emigrating to the USA.

That was good advice my grandmother gave me.

1. http://hotelhetweeshuis.nl

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terp

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_the_Netherlands

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_the_Netherlands#Family_and_issue