John Lambert Tiemeyer
John Lambert Tiemeyer was born Jan Lambertus Tiemeijer at Veendam, a canal town in the peat country of eastern Groningen, on 15 September 1894, and the birth was registered two days later as number 207 in the town's register. His father, Jan Tiemeijer, was a skipper's son from Sappemeer who had married Maria Bartelds, a seaman's daughter, at Veendam in January 1884 and by then was working as a labourer. Jan Lambertus was the sixth of eight children: Marie Frances (1885), Minnie (1887), Nellie Helena (1889), Jantena (1891), Frances (1893), himself, Peter Hendrik (1896) and Lambertus (1901). His second name honoured his mother's father, Jan Lammerts Bartelds.
In 1901, the year both of his father's parents and his mother's father died at Veendam, the family was entered in the provincial list of emigrants as leaving Veendam for Grand Rapids, North America, members of the Dutch Reformed church. Jan Lambertus was six. His father went farming at Grandville, south of Grand Rapids, and the boy grew up as John in the Dutch settlement there.
In 1918 he married Rose Jacoba Van Tuinen, a Grand Rapids girl whose father had been a village schoolmaster in Friesland before emigrating. They settled at Cutlerville, the farming village on the Kalamazoo road, and had seven children: Lena Frances (1919), Marie Agnes (1921), Johanna Tena (1923), John Wesley (1924), Gertrude Nella (1926), Peter William (1929) and Jack Lambertus (1931). From 1942 he was farm manager of the hospital farm at Cutlerville, the farm that fed Pine Rest, the Christian psychiatric hospital the Dutch Reformed community had founded there. His father died in 1948 at Grand Rapids with 103 descendants; his brothers Peter and Bert farmed near him at Cutlerville.
John died in Kent County on 31 August 1970, two weeks before his seventy-sixth birthday. He is buried in Blain Cemetery at Cutlerville, lot 55 E, grave 6, under a grey granite stone that reads TIEMEYER, with Rose's panel beside his. Rose outlived him by ten years.
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If John Lambert Tiemeyer is in your family, start your own tree.
Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "John Lambert Tiemeyer (1894-1970)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-lambert-tiemeyer-1894-1970-4ecc62.