Jacobus van Densen
Jacobus van Densen was born on 3 January 1842 at Blerick, a village on the west bank of the Maas River in the municipality of Maasbree, in the Dutch province of Limburg. Blerick faces the town of Venlo across the river. His birth was registered at Maasbree the next day. He was a son of Gerard van Densen, a clog maker, and Gertrudis Janssen.
He grew up in a large household at Blerick. The population register of 1850 to 1862 lists him under his father's roof with his brothers Laurens, Pieter and Joannes and his sister Joanna. The family worked the land. When his brother Joannes married in 1872, the clerk wrote their father down as a landbouwer, a farmer.
On 9 April 1874 Jacobus married Wendelina Hubertina Lankes at Belfeld, the next village up the Maas. He was 32 and a farmer. She was 29, a farm woman of Belfeld, the daughter of Mathijs Lankes and Gertrudis van Horen. Her father had died in 1851.
Their first child, Anna Gertrudis, was born at Belfeld on 23 December 1874. The couple then moved back to Blerick and set up house with his aging parents. The population register of 1860 to 1890 shows them all under one roof: Gerard, by then a clog maker in his seventies, his wife Gertrudis, their unmarried sons Laurens and Peter, Jacobus, who is described as a daglooner, a day laborer, and his wife and children. Three more children were born there: Hendrica Gertrudis on 17 March 1877, Laurens Matheus on 22 December 1878, and Johannes Gerardus on 25 February 1883. In the household his wife is written as Angelina Hubertina, the name she seems to have used every day.
Both his parents died at Blerick in 1882, his mother in June and his father in November.
The son Laurens Matheus went to America and settled in Brown County, Wisconsin, where he was known as Michael Lawrence Van Densen. He named his first son George Jacob. A stone in Saint Paul Catholic Cemetery at Wrightstown, Brown County, reads "Wife of Jacob Vandensen" for an Angeline Vandensen born on 13 January 1844 and died on 15 January 1916. The day and month of birth are Wendelina's, and the name is the one she was called at Blerick. That makes it very probable that Jacobus and his wife emigrated to Wisconsin too, and that she is the woman buried at Wrightstown. When and where Jacobus died is not known.
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Cite: Heirology, "Jacobus van Densen (b. 1842)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jacobus-van-densen-1842-d264a1.