In 1910, Elizabeth Lillian Coleman lived at 547 Hague Street in Rochester, New York, in a neighborhood called Dutchtown. Her mother, Julia Kester, came from a German-American family. Five years later Elizabeth married Thomas Wigbert Frank, another German-American. Her mother’s family, her husband’s family, and the neighborhood all pointed toward Germany.
The name Dutchtown seems to offer a clue to another part of Elizabeth’s ancestry. It offers the wrong one. The neighborhood took its name from Deutschtown, after its German settlers.[1]
Elizabeth actually did have Dutch grandparents. Her father’s name, Coleman, had been Cooijman. His parents, Pieter Jacobus Cooijman and Maria Catharina Lang, came from Hoofdplaat and Biervliet in the Netherlands. I can follow that connection through the genealogy. What I do not have is an account from Elizabeth or her daughter Eunice of what those places meant to them. Their ancestry is recoverable; their knowledge of it is harder to reach.
How does a family forget where it came from?
At first, I thought the explanation would be the familiar American one: immigrants arrived, a name changed, children married into other families, and the old country slipped out of conversation. Following the Cooijmans backward, however, took the question somewhere else. Hoofdplaat was preceded by Boschkapelle and Stoppeldijk; farther back were Graauw, Stekene, and Waasmunster. The line crossed the present border between the Netherlands and Belgium and continued into the fifteenth century.
I began by thinking of these as our Dutch and Belgian ancestors. The geography seemed straightforward enough. What became less straightforward was deciding when those descriptions actually explained anything.
What it meant to be from Waasmunster
The earliest generations in my family’s working lineage are associated with Waasmunster in the Land of Waas. It places Rogier Van Berckmost, my fourteenth great-grandfather, around 1480 and his son Gillis around 1510, followed by Coenraed and Petrus Verberckmoes. The dates and relationships at this early end of the line remain provisional, including the placement of Petrus as Coenraed’s son. Waasmunster is where the surviving account begins; it need not be where the family began.
Today the village is Belgian. Around 1500 it belonged to the County of Flanders within the Burgundian-Habsburg lands. Belgium as a modern state lay more than three centuries ahead. Even the broader Netherlands was then a developing political association whose inhabitants retained strong local and provincial allegiances.[2]
If Rogier went to market in another town, what would he have needed to say about himself? His village, occupation, kin, or the household with which he did business could each have established something that a broad territorial description could not. Someone might already know his brother-in-law. Someone might remember a debt. Being from a place meant having a position among people who could place you.
The physical landscape helps explain the density of those relationships. Waasland agriculture was laborious and closely managed. Its characteristic bolle akkers, fields raised toward their centers and edged by drainage ditches, were made through cultivation and earth moving; archaeological evidence suggests that the practice developed from the fifteenth century. The productive countryside was partly an achievement of generations of work.[3] Maintaining fields, finding labor, obtaining access to land, and getting crops to market bound households into relationships extending beyond their own plots.
Roosenberg Abbey was part of that world. Its canonesses followed the Augustinian rule, but the institution’s reach was also material. Gifts of property and rights, together with the dowries of women entering the community, had built an extensive estate by the late fourteenth century. Its holdings reached across the Waasland and into territory now in Zeelandic Flanders. The abbey’s surviving records include property registers, rents, maps, and documents of estate management.[4] Its presence mattered to people with crops to grow and obligations to meet as well as to people attending worship.
Within such a society, a family’s past could have very practical uses. Inheritance, tenancy, reputation, and obligations between households gave people reasons to remember relatives and earlier arrangements. How far an ordinary household remembered is another question. We cannot assume indifference to ancestors merely because it left no pedigree. The past was present as social knowledge, not necessarily as genealogy.
Nor did these ancestors inhabit a succession of interchangeable, quiet village years. The dates assigned to Petrus in the family genealogy, 1545–1592, place his life across the religious and political rupture of the Low Countries. The iconoclasm of 1566 and the revolt against Spanish rule developed into a prolonged struggle in which churches, towns, and rural districts changed hands. Religious allegiance became a matter of public authority, with consequences for property and the institutions through which communities organized their lives.[5]
In Waasmunster, that upheaval had a specific address. The Belgian State Archives dates the plundering and destruction of Roosenberg Abbey to 1583. Its buildings did not return to use until 1611, and its earlier wealth was never fully recovered.[4] On the genealogy’s chronology, Petrus was alive when it was destroyed and his daughter Jacomijne was a teenager. Neither can be placed at the scene, but the disruption belonged to their region and generation. An institution that had helped organize local life for centuries was suddenly unable to occupy its own premises.
Remaining in the same district did not mean remaining in the same world.
Marriages on a familiar map
The next generations lead through Belsele, Kemzeke, Nieuwkerken-Waas, and Stekene. Jacomijne Verberckmoes appears at Belsele. Her daughter, also Jacomijne, bore the surname de Maere and died at Kemzeke, where her husband Nicolaus Ivens was probably born. Their daughter Johanna Ivens married Pieter Luijcks of Nieuwkerken-Waas. Both died in Stekene. The husband’s birthplace does not reliably predict where the next household will establish itself.
Placed together, these villages describe a connected district. Kemzeke’s road pattern was oriented toward the route between Sint-Niklaas and Hulst. The Stekense Vaart, first constructed in 1315, connected Stekene with a wider system of transport toward Hulst, Ghent, and Rupelmonde, though war and subsequent alterations repeatedly affected its usefulness.[6] These were places linked by more than their appearance in our tree.
The women make the pattern particularly visible. In this stretch of the direct line, Verberckmoes becomes de Maere, then Ivens, then Luijcks. The women remain identifiable under their own names in the records, while their children carry different ones. The family did not disappear. Its documentary label did.
The records do not tell us what the daughters remembered or how often they visited their relatives. They do put successive households within a geography where contact remained practicable. Moving to Kemzeke did not require Belsele to become a lost homeland.
Across the border, still among Catholics
Joannes Luijcks, son of Johanna Ivens and Pieter Luijcks, was born in Stekene in 1655. He married Anna Baptiste, who came from Graauw en Langendam to the north. Their daughter Joanna was born there in 1691. Joannes eventually died at Stoppeldijk; Anna died at Pauluspolder in Hontenisse.
Joanna’s birthplace places the couple in Anna’s community when their daughter was born. The records do not establish why they settled there, but the direction matters: in this generation the line crosses into the wife’s locality.
The frontier Joannes crossed had been made through war. Hulst fell to the Dutch Republic in 1645, ten years before his birth, and the Peace of Münster in 1648 confirmed the division. This northern part of Flanders became Staats-Vlaanderen, governed by the States General rather than admitted as an equal province with its own representation. Fortifications and garrisons gave the boundary a formidable physical presence.[5]
Water had also been used as a weapon. Dikes were breached during the fighting, land flooded, and inhabitants displaced. Reclamation and resettlement subsequently created opportunities in a landscape damaged by war. In the Land of Hulst, settlers came particularly from the Catholic Waasland. Joannes’s movement fits that regional pattern, although we do not know his personal reason for making it.[7]
For Catholics, the difference in government was consequential. After the conquest, Catholic clergy were expelled and public worship restricted. Communities maintained religious life through visiting priests and churches beyond the border. People from Hulst worshipped near Klinge on the southern side; Stekene served Catholics from the vicinity of Koewacht and Sint-Janssteen. Missionary clergy from the Waasland also worked north of the boundary. By the end of the seventeenth century, a network of Catholic stations had developed within the territory.[8]
I had expected the frontier to explain how the southern connection weakened. Here were Catholic communities for whom it created a continuing reason to cross back. A southern church could become more important to a northern household because the governments differed. The division I had been treating as an explanation of separation was also helping sustain contact.
Language retained a similar geography. The dialects of the Land of Hulst remained closely connected to those of the Waasland; the frontier did not become a matching linguistic division.[7] Joannes could enter a different jurisdiction while encountering familiar speech and religious practice, as well as a wife whose family was already established there.
Calling this the moment our Belgian line became Dutch had hidden the most interesting part of the move. Joannes left the Spanish Netherlands, but how much of his familiar world had he actually left?
When the new place becomes home
Joanna Luijcks married Adrianus Van Passel of Boschkapelle. Both died at Stoppeldijk. Their son Sebastianus was born there in 1722 and died there in 1782; his daughter Juliana was born there in 1745 and died there in 1819. Birth and death entries do not account for every intervening year, but the repetition establishes a substantial attachment across generations.
For Joannes, the district had been a destination. For Juliana, it was her birthplace and her father’s. Stoppeldijk was home before she had any reason to think about an ancestral homeland.
Then the line reaches south again. Juliana married Antoine Joseph Cooijman, whose birthplace is listed as Hulshout, in the southern Netherlands.[14] His French-form given name adds another small question, although it tells us neither what language he spoke at home nor what identity he claimed. The birthplace is the more consequential detail: the southern connection was renewed in Juliana’s own marriage.
Juliana’s children had a locally born mother and a southern-born father. Whatever they knew about the more distant Waasland ancestors, their father’s origin belonged to the immediate family. An older connection could fade from view while a newer one brought the south back into the household.
Even staying in Stoppeldijk brought changes. Juliana was born under the Dutch Republic, lived through French rule, and died after the territory’s incorporation into Zeeland in 1814 and the formation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815.[9] The authorities had changed around a woman whose birth and death remained attached to the same place.
Did Juliana know the names Rogier or Gillis, or think about Waasmunster at all? I cannot tell. But calling her attachment to Stoppeldijk an instance of forgetting would assume that the earlier place had once been central to her. An ancestral connection can remain real while ceasing to be the connection through which a person locates herself. It can also be a connection a descendant discovers that she herself never knew.
A village younger than its residents
Juliana and Antoine’s son Jacobus Cooijman was born at Boschkapelle in 1777. He married Anne Catharine Ivens of Hontenisse, and both later died at Hoofdplaat. Their son Pieter Jacobus was born there in 1821 and married Maria Catharina Lang of nearby Biervliet.
Hoofdplaat’s polder was enclosed in 1778, a year after Jacobus was born. Building the village began in 1780.[10] The place that became his son’s birthplace was being created during his own childhood.
The reclamation had followed lengthy disputes over rights to the land. Once enclosed, the polder required settlement and services. A grain mill was erected in 1780; building trades and other businesses followed, together with provision for a church and school.[11] New agricultural land meant more than new fields. It meant opportunities for households to establish themselves in a community that had scarcely existed a generation earlier.
Jacobus’s reason for moving remains unknown. He was entering a settlement whose local society was still being assembled from people arriving with skills, capital, labor, and ties elsewhere.
For Pieter, born in 1821, this recently made place was simply where life began. His parents’ move had supplied him with a home that he would eventually leave. The old country remembered by an emigrant can include a village that was new to his father.
By Pieter and Maria’s adulthood, the province’s agricultural economy offered increasingly uncertain prospects to many households. Potato disease devastated harvests in the mid-1840s. Food shortages and disease intensified existing problems of poverty and limited opportunity. Zeeland’s dependence on agriculture left many families exposed when crops or earnings failed.[12] The pressure to leave varied by district, occupation, resources, and religion. Emigration required money and arrangements as well as dissatisfaction; the poorest were not necessarily those best able to go.
America was also becoming a practical destination through other people’s departures. From the 1840s, small groups from western Zeeuws-Vlaanderen went to New York, including Rochester, Albany, Buffalo, and agricultural communities east of Rochester. They preceded and accompanied the better-known migrations that founded Dutch settlements farther west.[13] Each successful arrival made the route less abstract for those considering it.
Pieter and Maria joined that broader movement. By 1858 their son Peter had been born in New York. The family evidence used here does not identify the precise combination of pressures and opportunities behind their departure. The regional history does show why crossing the Atlantic had become conceivable within a few decades of the previous generation’s move to a new polder village.
This journey altered the terms of family contact. Belsele and Kemzeke could remain part of one accessible network after a marriage. Hoofdplaat and Rochester demanded ships, money, and lengthy travel. Letters could carry news, but they could not reproduce the ordinary acquaintance through which children learned who belonged to whom. Much more now depended on what people chose, or found time, to tell.
The people who might have told it
Somewhere in the American history of this family, Cooijman became Coleman. The records establish the transformation without preserving the decision that produced it. I have not established who first adopted the spelling or how consistently it was used at the beginning. By the next generation, Peter J. Coleman carried a name that required no explanation in English.
By Elizabeth’s marriage in 1915, her world can be measured in Rochester street addresses. She lived at 926 Jay Street and worked in a shoe factory; Thomas Frank, a machinist, lived at 561 Campbell Street, a short walk away. They married at Holy Family, Elizabeth’s parish. After centuries of movement and an ocean crossing, the direct line again passes through a marriage between people living within a few neighboring streets.
Catholicism remained a familiar part of family life. It had linked communities across the frontier near Hulst, and it appears again in the Rochester baptisms and marriage. But the continuity now had a different social setting. A parish could preserve religious practice while helping a family become part of a German-American neighborhood. The survival of one affiliation did not guarantee that a regional origin would be remembered alongside it.
The grandparents’ dates suggest how the opportunity to hear about that origin narrowed. Maria Catharina Lang died in 1891, before Elizabeth was born. Pieter Jacobus Cooijman died in 1898, when she was about five. The people who had known Hoofdplaat and Biervliet firsthand were absent or present only briefly in her childhood.
Elizabeth’s father Peter, however, lived until 1922. She was twenty-nine when he died. That interval leaves ample room for conversations about his parents, but I have no surviving account of them. The grandparents’ deaths reduced her access to firsthand recollections of the Netherlands; they do not establish that she grew up knowing nothing about it.
Eunice, born in 1924, never knew Peter Coleman. Julia Kester died in 1926, when Eunice was two. Elizabeth was still there. Whether she passed on a detailed family account, a few names, or very little is not established by the material available to me. These dates show who could have spoken to whom; they do not recover what was said.
The German connections had living representatives in Elizabeth’s mother’s family and in her husband’s. The Dutch connection increasingly required explanation: Coleman had once been Cooijman, and two people buried in Rochester had begun their lives in Hoofdplaat and Biervliet. That difference helps explain how the older origin could become less visible, without locating a particular break in its transmission.
What the records give back
Returning to Elizabeth on Hague Street, I am less sure that forgetting names everything I have been following. Juliana’s home was Stoppeldijk. Pieter’s was Hoofdplaat. To describe either simply as a departure from an older origin gives the distant ancestor priority over the person living there. What belongs to their history and what belonged to their own understanding of it are different questions.
I have arrived at calling this ancestry Zeelandic Flemish. The phrase keeps the Waasland origins, the Flemish connections sustained under Dutch government, and the Zeeland villages in the same account. It is my description of the history that emerges, rather than a claim about what every ancestor called herself or himself.
A direct biological line is not a continuous memory. The records can return Cooijman to Coleman and put Waasmunster back on the family map. They cannot tell us which stories Elizabeth heard from her father, or which names Juliana recognized when someone spoke of the south.
I can now trace a route from Elizabeth’s Rochester address to the villages behind it. Whether she could have followed that route herself is the part the family tree cannot give back.
Sources
Family names, relationships, dates, and locations follow the author’s working genealogy, The Path from Belgium to Netherlands to USA, the life histories of Elizabeth Lillian Coleman and Eunice Margaret Frank, and accompanying family-tree material. These compilations provide the direct line used here; the early relationships are provisional.
- New York State Department of Transportation, Dutchtown Neighborhood History.
- Alastair Duke, The Elusive Netherlands: The Question of National Identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt.
- Flemish Heritage Agency, Barbierbeekvallei en Bolakkergebied.
- Belgian State Archives, Inventory of the archives of Roosenberg Abbey, on the estate, the destruction of 1583, and the return to the buildings in 1611.
- Piet van Cruyningen et al., Monumenten in Nederland: Zeeland, historical overview.
- Municipality of Stekene, History of the Stekense Vaart; Flemish Heritage Agency, Kemzeke.
- Ghent University, Dialectologie: Zeeuws-Vlaams, on war, resettlement, and the relationship between the dialects of the Land of Hulst and Waasland.
- L. J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw, the Land of Hulst and border missions, on clergy, worship across the frontier, and Catholic stations.
- Territorial chronology: incorporation of former Staats-Vlaanderen into Zeeland, 1814; United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1815. See also the historical overview in note 5.
- Zeeuwse Ankers, Schorers graf, on reclamation in 1778 and village construction from 1780.
- Hoofdplaat village history, Informatie Hoofdplaat, on land rights, settlement, the mill, and village services.
- Zeeuwse Ankers, Bittere armoede en het geloof; Michael Wintle, Push-factors in Emigration: The Case of the Province of Zeeland in the Nineteenth Century.
- Encyclopedie van Zeeland, Zeeuwse gemeenschappen in de Verenigde Staten.
- Flemish Heritage Agency, Hulshout. The standard place-name is used here for the birthplace spelled “Hulsthout” in the family compilation. Antoine’s birthplace is taken from that compilation, not independently established by this place history.
- IMAGE: https://www.eriecanal.org/Rochester-4.html
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