Ancestors

Jacob Wessels van Tuinen

Jacob Wessels van Tuinen was born on 18 July 1833 at Ee, a village on the old sea-clay of Oostdongeradeel in the far north-east of Friesland, the son of Wessel Gerrits van Tuinen, a Kollum man, and Aukje Jacobs Kuipers from Augustinusga. A brother Jacob had died at a year old in February 1833, and he took the name. His elder brother Gerrit, born at Dantumawoude in 1829, became a shoemaker, and so did Jacob. His mother died in 1855 and his father, at sixty, married a widow of Oosternijkerk in 1860.

On 16 May 1857 at the municipal office of Oostdongeradeel, Jacob, a shoemaker of twenty-three, married Gertje Ruurds Nicolai of Ee, who was thirty-three, ten years his senior, the daughter of a farmer who had died in 1847. Two of their children lived: Aukje, born 23 August 1858, and Johannes, born 25 November 1863, who was a schoolteacher by seventeen.

In the spring of 1881 the family sold up. On 21 April Jacob sold a house and yard at Ee before the notary at Metslawier for 850 guilders, and on 21 May the four of them were entered in the Frisian emigration register as leaving for the United States: Jacob the shoemaker, Gertje, Johannes the teacher and Aukje the seamstress. They went to Michigan and in time to Lucas in Missaukee County, in the cut-over pine land north of Cadillac, where Aukje married Romke Sanders Prince and Johannes married Lena van Houten and settled near Grand Rapids.

Gertje died at Lucas on 20 September 1905, and Jacob wrote her death notice for the Dutch newspaper himself, signing it from Lucas: forty-eight years they had shared sour and sweet together. He lived on nine more years, long enough to be a great-grandfather, and died on 11 August 1914, aged eighty-one years and some days, as the family's notice in the Dutch press put it, dated from Byron Center. He is buried with Gertje, Aukje and Romke Prince under one granite stone in Richland Township Cemetery at Lucas, cut VAN TUINEN PRINCE, JACOB W. 1833-1914.

If Jacob Wessels van Tuinen is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Jacob Wessels van Tuinen (1833-1914)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jacob-wessels-van-tuinen-1833-1914-9ce8f7.