How I could have been Alexander Wattjong

Tracing back my family history in Zierikzee

I’m sure my ancestors walked through the 14th-century Noordhavenpoort, one of the three remaining city gates of the city of Zierikzee. (all photos: Alexander Verbeek)

Walking through the beautifully preserved town of Zierikzee with more than 500 registered monuments feels like journeying through history. I might experience the connection to the past even more than others because my family's history began in 18th-century Zierikzee. The streets where I just did my shopping would have been the same. They are even likely to have had the same names as when my ancestors walked them. Many of the houses and churches I passed today already existed those days.

The oldest ancestor I could trace in the blurred pages of Zeeland's history is Thomas Verbeek. He was born around 1750, and 24 years later, his first child, Catharina, was born in Zierikzee. Unfortunately, I don't know much more about him than these scarce facts and that he was married to my great-great-great-etc grandmother Abigael de Knek. The information I found about her also refers to the surname De Griek (meaning "the Greek" in English with a question mark added to the notes for extra confusion about my family history).

Since the mid-17th century, the Gasthuis Kerk (also known as the Kleine Kerk, the Small Church) has looked like this.

Catharina got a sister, Anthonia, but her birthday is unknown. She was born probably around 1779. During her life, Catharina moved from the island of Schouwen-Duiveland to Walcheren, an island further to the south. She survived two husbands; first, she was married to Pierre Wattjon, and I found a confirmation of their wedding in the wedding book of the Reformed Congregation of Kruiningen. Here Pierre is called Petrus, and the date of marriage is January 6 instead of January 7, 1804, which I had found elsewhere. The file states that Catharina lived in Kruiningen while Pierre, alias Petrus, lived in Middelburg. Eleven years after her first husband died, she married Willem Elderfield in 1825, a porter six years younger than Catharina. When Willem died in 1845 at 64, his occupation was described as workman and night watchman.

This afternoon, I looked at my collected names and dates, wondering why her son Jan carried his mother's name. And thus why my surname is Verbeek instead of Wattjong. Only then did I realize that her first son, Jan, was born in Middelburg in 1798, six years before her marriage to Pierre/Petrus Wattjong. So when Catharina was 24, her first son was born out of wedlock, and thus, he got her surname.

I never get bored walking the streets of Zierikzee, and I would love to know in which house Thomas lived during the 1770s.

I wonder what had happened and how unforgiving the Reformed Congregation of Kruiningen was in the late 18th century. I fear that poor Catharina, an unmarried mum in a poor part of the Netherlands, must have had a tough time. And her challenges continued even after her marriage; seven years later, the archives mention the birth of a lifeless child. Then, three years later, Pierre died at the age of 37.

So in 1800, the future of the Verbeek family in the province of Zeeland relied only on a two-year-old toddler named Jan Verbeek, who lived with his 26-year-old unmarried mother Catharina in either Vlissingen or Kruiningen on the island Walcheren. He did well; he was a carpenter and shipbuilder who lived until the age of 81, and three of his six children also started families. Five generations after Jan, I was born.

This afternoon in Zierikzee

More than 200 years after the birth of Jan, I moved back to the island of Schouwen-Duiveland. It closes a circle in history since I returned to the town where Jan's grandfather Thomas, the oldest Verbeek I could find in Zeeland, lived in the late 18th century.

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Huis "De Haene" is the oldest house in Zeeland: late 14th century and a stepped gable in Bruges style.

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