Johannes Jacobus Van Tuinen
Johannes van Tuinen was born on 25 November 1863 at Ee, a village of the clay farmland in Oostdongeradeel, the north-east corner of Friesland, and his birth was registered at the municipal office the next day, the parents noted as living at Ee. His father, Jacob Wessels van Tuinen, was the village shoemaker, thirty years old; his mother, Gertje Ruurds Nicolai, was forty, ten years older than her husband, and he was her last child. His only surviving sister was Aukje, five years older. He was called Johannes Jacobus, Jacob's Johannes, in the Frisian way.
He was a bright boy, and by seventeen he was an onderwijzer, a schoolteacher, at Ee. In the spring of 1881 the family decided on America. On 21 April 1881 his father sold the family's house and yard at Ee to a Groningen buyer for 850 guilders before the notary at Metslawier, and on 21 May 1881 the four of them, Jacob the shoemaker, Gertje, Johannes the teacher and Aukje the seamstress, were entered in the Frisian emigration register as leaving Oostdongeradeel for the United States. They settled among the Dutch of western Michigan.
In 1888 he married Folkelina van Houten, called Lena, a Grand Rapids girl of eighteen whose parents had come from Goedereede and from Niezijl in Groningen. They had nine children: Gertie (1890), Rose Jacoba (1893), Cora (1896), Jacob (1901), Louise (1903), Agnes (1905), Peter (1909), William (1913) and Wesley Arthur (1915). His parents and his sister's family farmed at Lucas in Missaukee County, where his mother died in 1905 and his father in 1914; the Van Tuinens and Prinses share one stone there. Cora died in 1916 at twenty. His son Peter became a minister.
John died on Wednesday, 11 December 1929, aged sixty-six. The family's printed notice, from Byron Center, read: "it pleased God to take from us our beloved husband, father, and grandfather, JOHN VAN TUINEN, at the age of 66 years. Though we grieve deeply at our loss, we rejoice in the assurance of his salvation, his daily walk and confession testified of his faith in his Lord." It was signed by his widow, by Mr. and Mrs. John E. Oosterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. John L. Tiemeyer, by Jacob, Peter, Louise, William, Agnes and Wesley, and by twelve grandchildren. He is buried in Blain Cemetery at Cutlerville under a granite stone cut FATHER, JOHN VAN TUINEN, 1863-1929. Lena outlived him by thirty-eight years.
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Cite: Heirology, "Johannes Jacobus Van Tuinen (1863-1929)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/johannes-jacobus-van-tuinen-1863-1929-bc72bf.