Research Log - HOEKSTRA & De HAAN research

Home again for the second day due to laryngitis, I spent time at the Tresoar website trying to scare up some leads on my earliest known HOEKSTRA and De HAAN ancestors. Tresoar is the Frisian History and Literacy Center (Province of Friesland, the Netherlands) , and is a wonderful resource of a variety of abstracted Frisian civil and church records. I found 4th-great-grandmother Fokeltje Jans De HAAN's death record abstract of 22 Jun 1847 in the municipality of Kollumerland, stating she was 70 years old and a widow. No luck on a baptismal record for her or a definitive death record for husband Marten Lieuwes HOEKSTRA. I also looked in surname registration records of 1811 to attempt to find Marten, Fokeltje, or their parents listed. Either there weren't exact matches or there were too many possible matches, and with not enough identifying information, there was no way to be sure. Most Dutch people did not have surnames prior to the Napoleonic government ordering them to register one in 1811. They used patronyms, and unless they had a unique name, it's difficult to differentiate between the many men named Marten Lieuwes at that time...especially when none lived in the Holwerd area of the Westdongeradeel municipality, which is the town in which Marten and Fokeltje married.

I made sure to print out the abstractions of Fokeltje's death record and Marten's and her marriage record for my HOEKSTRA binder I'm putting together. I also spent some time adding the data and properly citing my sources (!) in my RootsMagic genealogy program.