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.
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.
The Family Kalamazoo 