(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Today’s genealogical post is a little different…but there is still a travel element.
I had long assumed that I was the first and only “Pierre Vanderhout” in the world, as our family’s genealogy has been documented in book form back to the mid-1500s and there wasn’t any other Vanderhout (usually written as “van der Hout” in Dutch) named Pierre. However, it appears that I am not the first person to bear this name.
On February 26, 1678, Guillaume van der Hout was christened in Leiden, the Netherlands. The parents were Pierre van der Hout and Caterine Pierre. The witnesses were Elizabeth van Danne and Gregoire Cresson. This event was recorded by the “RK Kerk de Zon” in Leiden; the document can be found here (the relevant entry is numbered “9005”).
This was only the beginning of an unusual story. I couldn’t find any other genealogical information on these names: there was nothing on the direct descendants of Guillaume van der Hout nor on the direct ancestors of this other Pierre van der Hout. All I had to go on was the name of the church. “Kerk” means “church” in Dutch, while “de Zon” means “the sun”. I didn’t pay much attention to the “RK”; I had assumed it was a reference to the Reformed Church (a Protestant church that is quite prominent in the Netherlands).
However, some further research revealed an unusual twist. “RK” was actually a short form for “Rooms Katholiek”, the Dutch words for “Roman Catholic”. So, the “Sun Church” in Leiden was actually a Catholic church. That was a surprise, as the genealogy suggested that the first few centuries of van der Houts were all Protestant.
When we were in the Netherlands last summer, we visited some churches that dated back 800 years. I decided to find out if the “Sun Church” was still around, as it would be interesting on a future visit to see where this other Pierre van der Hout had once been. This led to another surprise: the Kerk de Zon was a secret church!
While the Netherlands was a tolerant country even in the 17th century (attracting persecuted religious groups from all over Europe), tolerance was a relative concept. Non-Protestants were free to practice their own religion as long as they did not draw too much attention to themselves. This meant that their places of worship could not be outwardly identifiable as such; they also could not enter and leave en masse.
So, was the 17th-century Pierre van der Hout somehow written out of the family tree because of religion? The multiple French names in the records of the Kerk de Zon provide a more likely answer.
Pierre van der Hout (or his ancestors) probably came from a French-speaking part of Europe and had a different surname. However, as they continued living in the Netherlands, it was common to adopt a Dutch surname to help assimilate into Dutch society.
Pierre’s family may have picked “van der Hout” simply because it was a common surname in that part of the Netherlands. However, picking a new name was often very literal. As “van der Hout” means “from the forest”, Pierre’s original French surname may well have been something like Desbois or LaForest.
While I could not find any other references to the 17th-century Pierre or Guillaume van der Hout, I suspect that the family’s descendants were around for a long time. Why? I managed to find a person named “Guillaume Pierre Johann van der Hout” – he was born in 1874 in Delft, the Netherlands (see photo at the top of this post) and is the only other “Guillaume van der Hout” I could locate.
Here, finally, is the travel angle…the only record I could find for Guillaume Pierre Johann van der Hout was an immigration record kept by the police of Antwerp, Belgium. For reasons unknown, he left Delft to live in another country. On this page, at number 97.416, you can see how this unusual story continued into at least the late 19th-century. I hope to investigate this further; in the meantime, it seems that anybody with my name is destined to move around!
[The photos in today’s post are all close to where my namesakes lived in the Netherlands.]