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Posts Tagged ‘Peek’

Toddler in Kalamazoo, circa 1882-1899

Posted in Alice Paak DeKorn, DeKorn, Family History, Genealogy, Joseph Peter DeKorn, Kalamazoo history, Kalamazoo late 1800s - early 1900s, Michigan history, Paak, Peek, Photography late 19th century, Remine, Richard DeKorn, tagged , , , , , , , on May 6, 2021| 27 Comments »

Here is an unidentified photo from a family album. The album is from the Remine/Paak branch. Because the subject is a toddler, it is almost impossible to identify the photo. But let’s see what we can figure out.

The most important clue comes from the photographer.

According to the well-researched list of photographers found HERE, I can calculate that this photo must have been taken between 1882 and 1899. See the screenshot below to see how I figured that. Abbey was at the East Main location during those years.

So the fact that the baby looks a little bit like Grandpa is irrelevant because it isn’t him as he was born in 1908. In fact, the child would be at least 11 or 12 years older than Grandpa.

Are we sure it’s a boy? I’m going to say it is a boy, based on the outfit. But if you disagree, let me know!

Could it be Harold Remine? He was born in 1897.

This is Harold:

I don’t see the resemblance. To me the baby pic and the young man pic look alike, but the baby/toddler unidentified pic looks more like Grandpa or even my mother. Does anybody else think the pic does look like Harold?

If it could be a girl, we have Therese Remine, born 1895, and Alice Leeuwenhoek, born 1897, but that baby is not Alice who had a very distinctive look as a baby and child. Here is Therese:

Therese Remine

Another possibility is that the child could belong to one of George Paake’s children. I don’t really think so, but their ages are all within the right time frame except the only boy was born in 1898 and would be too young. And the children would be photographed together, so it could only be the oldest, Cora, and I do not see a resemblance.

Front row: Theresa and Cora
Back row: Frances, George Jr., Jennie (Jane)

The only other child of the right age range from the Paak family (which is the broader branch associated with the photo album this image comes from) would be Joseph DeKorn, son of Richard and Alice, Grandpa’s Uncle.

If the child isn’t Joseph, then I’d have to look a little further afield. Keeping in mind that the Remines were related to Grandpa twice over–through both his maternal grandmother and maternal grandfather–I could look at some other families. However, I have two roadblocks to doing so. I cannot see that Ancestry, which is where my tree is located, has the ability to search by birth dates, for instance. Does My Heritage? i do have my tree loaded there as well. I’d like to be able to search through categories like that. Does anybody know a program that sorts like that?

The second roadblock is that farther out, my tree is still a little too sketchy or spotty to do a good job, especially when I would have to do it individual by individual.

What I can hope for is that one day I can make a good guess as to the identity of this baby. As you probably have experienced yourself, looking like Grandpa or mom is meaningless. My mother and her next door neighbor/good friend are often mistaken for sisters and they do look so much alike, much more than my mother does with her own sister. Mom and her friend just explain to people that they’re both “Dutch” hah. The reality is that we can compare unidentified photos with other photos to search for exact features, but when a child grows and becomes an adult some of those features can change remarkably. We can’t even begin to compare unidentified photos with family branches by examining features.

BUT WAIT.

Belatedly I see something that I didn’t notice before. In the same album there is a portrait of another child which has the exact same advertising from the photographer on the backside. The “setting” looks the same with the same chair. I suspect these are photos of siblings that were taken at the same time.

With the two photos, here side by side, it becomes important to narrow in on the genders and the ages because with the answer to those questions, I might be able to figure it out.

At this point, I really need help figuring out if these are boys or girls or one of each. My feeling is that the older child is a girl and the younger a boy, but that is a guess. And what age would you say each one is? I suspect that if they were considered babies they would be wearing white dresses, no matter what the gender, but the littler one certainly looks young enough for the white dress treatment, so that’s a little confusing. In a word, help!

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Off on a Tangent: Anna Catherina Paak Verhulst (with 3 Updates)

Posted in Alice Paak DeKorn, Bassa, Family History, Genealogy, Kalamazoo history, Kalamazoo late 1800s - early 1900s, Michigan history, Paak, Peek, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 30, 2020| 37 Comments »

 

In looking through some documents for my 3rd great grandfather Teunis Paak (or Peek), something on a document relating to one of his children caught my eye. Whenever I use the surname Paak, it could also be Peek. In fact, the history of the family in the Netherlands seems to indicate more usage of Peek, but in the United States there was more usage of Paak and Paake.

My great-great grandmother Alice Paak DeKorn, born 1852, was the oldest daughter, second oldest child. The third child was Anna Catherina or Annie, born 6 January 1855 in Lexmond, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands. In 1865, their mother Jacoba Bassa Paak passed away. Three years later the family immigrated to the United States. They lived for some time in Cooper, then moved to Kalamazoo.

In this portrait is she wearing a cloth coat with a fur scarf/stole of some kind and a fur hat?

 

Although she must have been a pretty woman, Annie doesn’t seem to have married until she was 35 years old, possibly living at home with her father, a celery farmer, until she did marry on 20 March 1890. Her new husband was a fairly recent immigrant (8 years before) from the Netherlands, Jacob (possible middle name Salomon or L.) Verhulst, another celery farmer or farm worker, the grandson of a Flipse woman. You may have read my posts about the Flipse family; there are interconnections between several of the branches in my extended family. Jacob was 41. Was this his first marriage or had he been married in the Netherlands? I looked on wiewaswie, but did not find a marriage for Jacob.

Annie and Jacob did not have any children. I find them together, in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 censuses.

Here are the locations:

1900: Kalamazoo Township (apparently farmland). The census doesn’t indicate if they owned the home or rented.

1910: North Parker Street, Kalamazoo Township (apparently farmland): I can’t find Parker Street–only Parker Avenue. I doubt that was it. I think this was rural and has changed names, but I could be wrong. The census doesn’t indicate if they owned the home or rented.

1920: 44 Mussel Avenue, Kalamazoo Township: owned the home. What an odd name for a street in Kalamazoo? I can’t find it on  Google maps.

I do think they purchased land. This is from the Kalamazoo Gazette on 8 May 1919:

I don’t know who Preintje was, but she was a Kloosterman, another surname associated with my family. Coincidentally, Annie’s great-grandmother was Annigje deWit, which is a variant of DeWitte.

This map showed up on Ancestry for Jacob for 1910, which would be around the time of the 2nd census listed.

You see the section going down on the right, near the railroad? The parcel listed for Jacob is the 7th down from the top. His neighbor, Klaas Mulder, is also listed as a neighbor on the 1910 census. I believe the Mulder family is also a neighbor on the 1900 census, so it’s highly likely that Annie and Jacob lived in the same home in both 1900 and 1910.

This parcel map and the transfer mentioned in the newspaper can’t be the same land parcels, since the transfer was in 1919, 9 years after the map showing a parcel owned by Jacob and Annie.  Perhaps after this 1919 transfer, the couple moved to the Mussel address and that is what is mentioned in the transfer? Or the transfer could have been an additional piece of property.

FIRST UPDATE: Sharon at Branches on Our Haimowitz Family Tree kindly did some research for me, and this is what she wrote: “I tried finding Mussel Ave myself on old street names. I noticed that there is a Mosel Ave ..checking the 1920 census it was written Mussel however looking at street directories 1929 & 1931 I found Anna and also Jacob with the listing on Mossel Ave 3 e of N. Westnedge (formally simply West) so ‘Mossel or Mosel’ was spelled wrong on census. definitely rural RFD – also I would say they possibly owned the farm land or leased it. It does indicate he was working on his ‘own account’ as opposed to ‘wage or salary.'”

Jacob passed away in 1923, and I do not yet have his death record.

HERE IS THE SECOND UPDATE: Sue Haadsma-Svensson found Jacob’s death ceritificate for me. Look at it carefully: does it look like his address was “Amsterdam Avenue”? If so, there is an Amsterdam Street in Kalamazoo, and it looks like they used to use “Avenue” more often than they do today–or perhaps it was used more informally.

What happened to Annie after Jacob’s death? This is where my interest was piqued!

I have not found her on the 1930 census. But I do have her death record for 6 October 1933. She died of an intertrochanteric fracture of the right femur and hypostatic pneumonia, which means she got sick and died from lying down too long with that broken leg.

Look where she died:

The Kalamazoo State Hospital. It says she lived there and died there. But why? Was it for a mental issue or was the hospital used at that time for other illnesses? THIRD UPDATE: Note that Jacob’s death certificate indicates that Annie lived at Amsterdam Avenue, not the State Hospital, in 1923.

I took the matter to the Facebook group “Vanished Kalamazoo,” a private group of 30,000 members. There are some great local historians on that site. This is what I discovered: What we know of as nursing homes really began around the time of WWII, so Annie died too early to have been in a nursing home. As an elderly woman, if she had mobility, mental (dementia), or illness issues, she would have needed to be taken care of somewhere. She had no children, and her husband was gone. According to these historians, the Kalamazoo State Hospital was used as a place for the elderly needing home and care. Remember, too, that her aging years were in the midst of the Great Depression. I am not sure if this had any bearing or not, but it is important to look at all the possible information.

One thing that troubles me is that she broke her leg at the State Hospital, so what was her care at the hospital like?

When I look at the Paak branch of the family, there are not a lot of descendants. which is a bit sad. Annie and Carrie had no children at all. Mary had three children, but zero grandchildren. Only Alice and George have descendants still living today.

 

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