How we lost an ancestor

For years the oldest man on the Van der Walt tree was Lieuwe Folkerts, born about 1570, somewhere in Friesland. He had no dates beyond that guess. No village, no wife, no trade. He was simply the man at the top.

Today we took him off the tree, because he was never on it.

Everything below him is solid

Lieuwe Lieuwes married Trijn Gaeledr at Dokkum on 5 July 1623, and the clerk wrote down one thing about him.

By 1628 the couple were living at Veenwouden. Their son Gaele farmed there, by the wall, and was dead by 1701. His son Andries was still at Veenwouden in the tax roll of 1744. Andries’s son Gaele Andriesz sailed for the Cape and landed in 1727.

Five generations, each with a record. The question was only ever about the man above Lieuwe Lieuwes.

There was exactly one document that could answer it

Dutch betrothal records of that period sometimes name the groom’s father. So we read it — twice, from two independent transcriptions, which agree exactly.

Two names. No father.

And the silence is not an accident of that one page.

Four mention a father at all, and only because he happened to be standing there as a wedding witness. Ours records no witnesses. The document that was supposed to prove him does not do that job, and never did, for anybody.

So we looked for him anywhere at all

One hundred and seventy-five Frisian records. Every spelling — Lieuwe, Liuwe, Lyuwe, against Folkerts, Folckerts, Folkerds.

• Dokkum, Dantumadeel, Veenwouden, Bergum, before 1623. Nothing.
• The only genuine pre-1623 Lieuwe Folkerts in Friesland is a cloth-shearer of Leeuwarden who married in 1614. He cannot have a grown son marrying nine years later.
• A promising “Lieuwe Folckerts of Dokkum”, 1635. On cross-check he is Lieuwe Fockes, a master carpenter, miscopied by a clerk in Leeuwarden.
• The Dokkum Burgerboek, 1574 to 1798. Every man who bought citizenship of the town, with his trade and where he came from. All 14,795 lines. No Lieuwe Folkerts, not once in 224 years.

Where he came from

We think we know. It is worth telling, because it could happen to anyone.

The Frisian archives site AlleFriezen carries a collection called Bevolking Tietjerksteradeel, verzameling Nieuwland. The records in it have no real dates, so the index defaults every one of them to 1 January 1600.

Search that site for Lieuwe Folkerts and you get an apparent 1600 entry at Bergum, a village three miles from Veenwouden. It looks exactly like what you are hoping for.

Open the record and it says something else.

A labourer. Born around 1728. Died in 1808. He appears in a Dutch genealogical database with his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather, all in the same village, none of them ours.

Somebody looking for a father found a familiar name beside a date that was not real, and worked backwards to about 1570. It was an honest mistake, and it stood for years — in our register, and in several others.

The trap is in the names

Frisian families did not use surnames. A man’s name was his father’s name. Lieuwe Folkerts means Lieuwe, son of Folkert. His son might be Folkert Lieuwes. His grandson, Lieuwe Folkerts again.

Every name in our own trunk appears in that other family, in a different order, a hundred years later. Searching for the name will always return men. It almost never returns your man.

What stands now

Lieuwe Lieuwes, brewer’s journeyman of Dokkum. Married 5 July 1623. At Veenwouden by 1628. He is the oldest van der Walt anyone can prove.

His patronymic tells us his father was called Lieuwe. That is all it tells us. We do not know the man’s trade, his village or his years, and we are not going to invent them.

Why we did this

It would have cost us nothing to leave him there. Nobody was checking. He made the line look longer and older, and a name at the top of a chart is exactly the kind of thing nobody questions.

But if we keep one man we cannot prove, every other name on the tree becomes a maybe.

The value of this register is that when it says something, you can lean on it. So the line is one generation shorter today, and entirely solid.