I haven’t written much about my grandfather’s paternal grandparents. I wrote about his aunt’s family, the Van Lieres, but we know very little about the parents of Grandpa’s father and his aunt.
His paternal grandmother was Jennegien (Jennie) Bomhoff. She was born 5 March, 1838 in Zwolle, Overjissel, the Netherlands. She passed away on 16 December 1924 in Kalamazoo.
She married Grandpa’s grandfather, Johannes (John) Zuidweg, in Goes, the Netherlands on 4 November 1869, when she was 31 years old and working as a maid.
Grandpa told me that she wore many layers of skirts and they all had pockets in them. Can you tell below that she was wearing layers of clothing? What do you think she carried in those pockets? He did tell me that he saw her pull an apple out from an under skirt.
The following photos were identified to me as Jennie. How old do you think she is in each one?
What style bonnet is she wearing? And how many decades did she wear that same bonnet?!
In the next photograph, she is the woman on the side, in the dark dress.
Here is some research Yvette Hoitink provided about this family:
In 1869, Jennegien married Johannes Zuijdweg in Goes, Zeeland, about 150 miles away. That is an uncommonly large distance for somebody to travel in the 19th century, especially for an unmarried woman from the working class. Further investigation showed that her brother Albert Bomhoff was married in Goes in 1867. It must be through this connection that Jennegien moved to Goes, where she worked as a maid prior to her marriage. A rich and easy to retrieve source of information for ancestors in the 19th century are the marriage supplements: the documents a bride and groom had to submit when they got married. Unfortunately, the Goes marriage supplements for the period 1811-1877 got lost in 1877. Since several marriages on the Zuidweg side took place in Goes, these records could not be obtained. Digital images of the marriage supplements of Lucas Bomhof and Jeuntien Dansser, the parents of Jennegien Bomhof, were retrieved from Familysearch.org. Lucas Bomhof was born as Nijentap, but his family took the name Bomhof around 1812. In the province of Overijssel, it was common to be named after the farm you lived on. It was only with the French occupation that people were obliged to take a hereditary surname. Nijentap may be the name of the farm that the family lived at.
The Family Kalamazoo 