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I was born and raised in Brainerd, Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Six generations of my family have lived, died, and been buried there - a fact I didn't know until I began my genealogical research in 1997. Except for my New England roots, some of which go back to immigrants from England (including some Mayflower passengers) in the 1600's, all my ancestors came from Europe to the New World (Canada or the U.S.) between 1857 and 1875, emigrating from (and immigrating to) Ireland (Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada), Holland (Oconto County, Wisconsin, on the north shore of Green Bay), Poland (Todd County, Minnesota), and Germany and Sweden (Crow Wing County, Minnesota). Two great-great-grandfathers and four great-great-granduncles from the Gardner and Sleeper families in Vermont fought in the Civil War. Sleeper ancestors in New Hampshire were in the Revolutionary War. My emigrant great-great-grandfather's last name was Van Ussen. His only son was the one who started using Van Essen here in the U.S. So the Van Essen relatives that I already know about are the only Van Essens that I'll be related to. I was a Rootsweb Sponsor from 1998 until 2000 when they were 'acquired' by Ancestry.Com, and I have been a member of the Morse Society since 1999, the Crow Wing County Genealogical Society since 1999, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants since 2000, the Irish Genealogical Society International since 2001, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) since 2006. I have a GEDCOM at the WorldConnect project at RootsWeb. This icon - - when it is next to a person's name, is hyperlinked to the entry for that person in the GEDCOM. Throughout these pages, the unvisited links are in red (to get your attention), and the already-visited links are in blue. Feel free to contact me with any suggestions or to make a genealogical connection. Enjoy! |
Here are most of the direct ancestor surnames, up through my 4th-gr-grandparents, that I have found so far. I've left out names beyond that in my New England lines since they are already pretty-well researched. I've also left out all the Swedish names, since those patronymic names change from generation to generation. Check out the Six-Generation Tree (see the menu above) for details on how they all relate. In alphabetical order (with links into the index of my WorldConnect database) they are:
Ariens, Baron / Barron, Bujala, Bellmuth, Bock, Bongers, Cebula, Ceelen, Chubbuck, Claesen / Claessens, Davis, De France, Flanders, Gardner, Geelkens / Gielkens, Gerardu, Gilson, Hill, Ibach, Kala / Kalla, King, Lamusga, Langley, Lyssy / Lysy, Maghan, Menting, Mitternacht, Morse, Pitman, Pendexter, Raaijmakers, Rausch, Robbins, Schumacher, Schuurmans, Sleeper, Smits, Swift, Tilton, Toner, Van Grunsven, Van Loon, Van Ussen, Welling, Weishalla / Wieshalla / Wiessalla / Wieszala, Zeegers / Zegers,
I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has any information on the ancestors listed below, or who has suggestions on where to look for information to help locate their origins. Thanks!
DISCLAIMER : | This information has not been verified. For entertainment purposes, only. |
25 Apr 2000 NOTE: Although I have now learned that the Van Essen name was a post-emigration change from the original Van Ussen, I've left this in for now.
The Van Es, Van Ess, and Van Essen surnames are of Dutch origin, but did not come into common usage until the beginning of the 19th century.
After Napoleon had conquered most of Europe, he decreed that starting January 1, 1811, accurate civil records of births, deaths, and marriages shall be maintained by the civil (instead of church) authorities in all the nations now contained within his empire.
In the area of what later became the Netherlands, surnames were not yet universally in common use. Part of Napoleon's edict required that every person must have a specific last name rather than continue to use patronymic "son of" names.
What's a poor peasant to do? Those that were living in the surrounding countryside for generations had never had to bother with last names. During the Middle Ages, when many cities were founded, it was common practice to build the city on higher ground. This not only made the city somewhat easier to defend against attacking armies, but also kept it high and dry in the Spring when the many rivers that run to the sea would overflow their banks onto the low-lying areas surrounding the cities.
The Dutch had a word for the ring of lower-lying pockets of farmland (usually separated by forest) that surrounded each of the cities. That word was "es". The Dutch word for "from" is "van". So - if you were from this outlying area, you were "van es", the plural of which is "van essen".
Thus, a last name of "Van Es", or, less frequently, "Van Essen", was chosen by many unrelated farmers around the pre-Dutch countryside, making those surnames very common - a fact that is still true in the Netherlands in modern times.
The bottom line? All Van Essen's are not necessarily related. The same goes for Van Ess's and Van Es's.
Once the ancestry is traced back before 1812, the civil records are not available (they didn't start until about 1812). Church records are about the only resource for tracing back further - and many of the people in those records might have single names, with some independent indication of family affiliation or parentage.
10. | All sorts of wonderful relatives (including distant cousins in Europe) who share my interest in family history and genealogy. |
9. | All sorts of wonderful pictures, copies of which I've obtained from various relatives and some of which are on my Image Gallery page. |
8. | The home village and the Catholic church records for my Polish ancestors, with the help of a researcher in Montana who, to my great fortune, already knew about that family line. |
7. | The cemetery file in Brainerd for my Swedish 2nd-great-grandaunt had a single supplementary sheet with details about the people in that lot. Much to my surprise, one of them was the mother, which of course, is my 3rd-great-grandmother, who I didn't even know had immigrated! |
6. | An 1888 autograph book in the possession of the grandchildren of its owner provided the link that re-united descendants of our Swedish immigrant ancestors. It turned out that my ancestors were using the surname from a recent second marriage. I never would have found them using that name! |
5. | The death record and final resting place of my Irish great-grandfather who had left his wife and three children in Brainerd in 1900 and moved away. He died in 1903 in Duluth and was buried in the family plot of his brother, where, by a nice stroke of luck, their mother was also buried! Later, we found an 1885 obituary for his father, who drowned in the Mississippi river. |
4. | Two 2nd-great-grandfathers and four of their brothers served in the Vermont Volunteers during the Civil War. Other ancestors were in various Revolutionary War battles. |
3. | Researching my Colonial New England ancestors paid off nicely when I finally linked into a Mayflower Family line! |
2. | A document in the archives in Oss, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands archives confirmed the family legend that the "van Essen" surname used to be "Ceelen"! A transcription of the 1811 name change petition (in French, since Napoleon had recently annexed the area) was provided by a distant cousin, Mark van Loon, for the change from "Ceelen" to "van Ussen". Later, I obtained a copy of the actual document for the Ceelen to Van Ussen Name Change in 1811. |
1. | The Catholic church baptismal record for my filia illegitima paternal grandmother listed the patria putativo as Thoma(s) Bock! My grandmother's mother refused to talk about the situation, so my grandmother lived her entire life without knowing who her biological father was. I found it a few months after starting my research. He's the only possible source of the dark brown eyes that my grandmother, father, two surviving brothers and I have. And indeed, his WWI Draft Registration Card confirms the brown eyes. |
Common ancestors are given within small {italicized curly brackets}.
Frans de Vries and Jan-Albert van Ree, my Dutch friends, patiently taught me some Dutch history and were kind enough to look up some records for me in the Netherlands.
Maudean Neill, Certified Genealogist, did a great job of tracing my Sleeper lineage in Vermont to New Hampshire where I connected with already-established pedigrees.
Frances Freitag spent hours doing volunteer lookups seeking my Dutch ancestors in Wisconsin censuses and immigrant passenger lists.
Ed and Peggy Stellmach have done extensive research with Catholic Church records from the region around Opole, Poland (Oppeln, Silesia, Prussia in the 1800s), and they already knew about my ancestors in that region and steered me to the exact records.
John and Mary Rhodes have an autograph book that belonged to their grandmother that was given to her by a cousin who was my gr-grandaunt, and with the added information of the names of my Swedish immigrant ancestors, John was able to provide enough info to Jill Seaholm (see below) to make the Swedish connection and John has been able to trace the line back from there.
Jill Seaholm is a researcher at Augustana University's Swenson Swedish Research Library whose detective work and persistence enabled her to identify Christina Rydén and daughter Emma Rydén in the emigration records of Göteborg (even though their surnames had been listed as Torsas and Thor) and subsequently found the entire family in a parish census.
Dr. Charles Flanders is working on the next edition of the "Flanders from Europe to America" book, and he sent me information about my 4th-gr-grandfather, Samuel, that was in the book's database.
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