Blowing out the Candles

#52ancestors—No. 37
Closest to your birthday

Blowing out the candles 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

Only one ancestor and I share the same February birthday — albeit it about 364 years apart. I had gathered some information about my Duchy of Brabant families and was doing historical exploration of the 16th century and early 17th century to better understand how my Maria wound up marrying Johannes de Hooges in 1608 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It appears that she was born the same year of the “Sack of Antwerp.” 

According to Wikipedia, “At the time Antwerp, in modern Belgium, was not only the largest Dutch city, but was also the cultural, economic and financial centre of the Seventeen Provinces and of north-western Europe. On 4 November 1576, unpaid Spanish soldiery mutinied: they plundered and burnt the city during what was called the Spanish Fury. Thousands of citizens were massacred and hundreds of houses were burnt down. As a result, Antwerp became even more engaged in the rebellion against the rule of Habsburg Spain. The city joined the Union of Utrecht (1579) and became the capital of the Dutch Revolt, which no longer was merely a Protestant rebellion but had become a revolt of all Dutch provinces.” 

Her name was Maria Tijron and purportedly she was born in Antwerp, the daughter of Anthoni Tijron and his second wife, Catharina Daneels. Research on my early Dutch and Flemish families has long been on the back burner — one of those “going to tackle it later” projects that genealogist are infamous for having — so many branches, so little time. 

It had been a long time since I had looked at my meager notes and sources for this line. It is a good thing that I did because I find no primary source for Maria’s birth, and as I examined the birth records of her eight children (all baptized in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands), I realized that if she was born in 1576, as some online genealogies claim, she would have been 32 years old when she married and about 44 years old when her youngest child (and my ancestor), Anthony de Hooges, was born. While not impossible, certainly not the norm. It is much more likely that she was about 22 years of age when she married, which would make her born about 1586 or so. And, now, I don’t know if her actual day of birth is correct. Where did that information come from? I have only a reference that has no original or trustworthy secondary sources. At least, I had so noted that..

I learned from The Memorandum Book of Anthony de Hooges (translated by Dirk Mouw; a publication of the New Netherland Research Center and the New Netherland Institute, 2012) that: "Tragedy struck the De Hooges family during Anthony's first few years of life. Indeed, tragedy struck repeatedly. His mother [Marion Tijron] died when he was very young, probably before this 3rd birthday and shortly after his 4th, his father died as well. 

“The absence of references to any siblings in surviving documents of a later date, written to, by or about the orphaned Anthony suggests that all of his seven siblings also died early in his life. It is likely that at least some of the members of his immediate family succumbed to the plague which is estimated to have claimed 11 percent or more of Amsterdam's population in 1624 and to have taken a smaller but still a devastating human toll the following year." 

So, it is back to genealogical digging before I even attempt to put this family’s story together. As it stands now, Maria Tijron and I may or may not share a common birthdate.