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Dutch surnames and naming patterns

You may have noticed that in some of the families from the Netherlands, several of the children had the same name. The Dutch often used set patterns in naming their children: the first boy born was named after the paternal grandfather, the first girl after the maternal grandmother. Then names went to great-grandparents or aunts and uncles. If a child died, the next born child of the same sex was often named after the deceased child. If a woman’s husband died, when she remarried again and had a son, this child would be named after the deceased husband. The same held true if a man remarried after his wife died.

The clerics and burgermeisters were not particularly well educated but peasants typically could not read or write beyond signing their name. Because of this, spelling of names changed depending upon who was writing the record.

In the days before the Civil Registration forced everyone to stick to a surname, people in the eastern part of the Netherlands were named after the farm they lived at. Since the surname might change every time a person moved, this sometimes offers difficulties in tracing Dutch ancestors. If a woman’s husband died, she would try to find a hard-working husband to marry and take over the farm if she didn’t have any brothers. The new husband would take the name of the farm.

When Dutch people arrived in the United States or other English-speaking countries, often their names got changed. This was either done on purpose, to make the name easier to write and remember, or by accident because the clerk didn’t know how to spell the name and wrote it down phonetically. Sometimes the last name came from their trade or occupation. For this reason, a single family name can often be found in many different spellings in different documents.

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