My next fill-in-the-gaps couple is one that merged the Mulder and the Zuijdweg families—and the reason my grandparents, a Mulder and a Zuidweg, were distant cousins because it grafted the Zuijdwegs onto the Mulder tree. Note: even in the Netherlands, the surname is sometimes spelled Zuijdweg and sometimes Zuidweg.
Adriaan Zuijdweg was born in 3 February 1805 in Goes, Netherlands. Adriaan was a tailor, so I found this image online to represent him. Unfortunately, I can’t locate anyone to credit for it, but would love to do so.
Apparently this seated position was common to tailors.
Johanna Mulder was born 10 March 1807, also in Goes. She was baptized on 29 March. The couple married 5 May 1836. Johanna worked as a maid at the time of the marriage.
In 1846, facing economic and religious pressures, Adriaan applied for the town of Goes to pay for he and his family to emigrate to the US, but he must have been denied. I suspect he was part of the separatist movement within the Reformed Church and wanted to join the group in Zeeland, Michigan. He must have been very disappointed that he couldn’t emigrate. You can read about the documentation for this on the old post: My Dutch Family Almost Arrived in the U.S. Decades Earlier.
Five years later, on 2 April 1951, he was dead at the age of 46.
The couple had six children. One of them was my 2x great-grandfather, Johannes Zuijdweg.
The youngest child, Willem, was a baby when his father died. Life must have been hard for Johanna after that. The economy in Goes at the time was not good and now she had six children, even a baby, to support by herself.
Many years later, Willem immigrated to Michigan in 1889 with his wife and two sons (a baby girl died in the Netherlands). The older brother, Adrian, was named for his grandfather, as was my great-grandfather. He lived in Cascade in Kent County. The younger brother, James William, changed his surname to Southway which is what Zuijdweg means. He lived in Detroit. Willem and his family were the first Zuijdwegs to live in the United States. Willem managed to fulfill his father’s dream of living in the United States. Willem’s brother Johannes, my great-great-grandfather, did not immigrate until he was much older–he followed his own son to the U.S.
On 11 June 1878, Johanna passed away at the age of 71. There is documentation that she was working as a “laborer” when she was in her early sixties. I suppose it’s possible she worked until she died.
I have the marriage and death records for both husband and wife. I also have the documention of Adriaan’s denied request to leave the Netherlands. I was able to get Adriaan’s military records from Yvette Hoitink.
According to Yvette’s research Adriaan did not serve in the military. Here is the military record (part of it):
I am missing both birth records for Johanna and Adriaan. And I sure wish I had photos, but considering that they were born in 1805 and 1807, I suppose that hope is unrealistic!
In general, now that I am back with an early generation in the Netherlands, this is what I can look for:
- birth record
- marriage record (including if there was more than one marriage)
- death record
These are what I can generally find, but not always, through Wiewaswie and other online sources. Yvette was able to search military records for me. And sometimes I have been blessed with information from Dutch cousins and readers, such as newspaper information. Because I can’t read Dutch if I want a less haphazard method of obtaining newspaper articles, I would need to hire a genealogist, such as Yvette, to search. Yvette’s expertise means that she knows how to find certain information that is not readily available–and where there are gaps of records because of fire, etc.
I had been frustrated that I have not been able to find birth records for Adriaan and Johanna as of yet. BUT maybe that was because I should have been looking for baptismal records instead! When I searched for those, I found Johanna’s baptismal record dated 29 March 1807. Her religion at birth was “Low German Reformed,” which simply means Dutch Reformed. “High German” is Lutheran. I had to order this record for a cost, but it got to me yesterday, in time for this post. Here is the cropped page for 1807. Johanna is at the bottom of the image.
1 – Zeeuws Archief
Maybe one day I will find Adriaan’s birth or baptismal record. I wonder if there is a spelling discrepancy either on the record itself or in the indexing.
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The Family Kalamazoo 