The Verbooms

The records behind Suzanna Verboom’s chapter in the Lakeman story — her maternal line, traced by Dutch civil registers out of a canal village south of Amsterdam back into the eighteenth century. Suzanna herself, and the needle she carried, are told in the Lakeman story; this page sets out the deep Dutch ground behind her.

The line behind the needle

Suzanna Verboom’s father was a tailor and barber in Ter Aar, and for a long time the family’s story stopped with him. It does not stop there any longer. Dutch record-keeping is among the best in the world — the parish Doop-, Trouw- en Begraafboeken (baptism, marriage, and burial books) and the civil registration Napoleon imposed in 1811 — and through it her line can now be traced, branch by branch, back into the eighteenth century: to dredgers and dike-workers on the Sliedrecht riverside, to a winkelierster and a dijkwerker in the drained polders of the far north, and to farming-and-fishing families on the islands of Goeree-Overflakkee. This is that line, told as far as the records honestly carry it, and tagged plainly where they run out.

The records put a name to the remembered father. On 15 May 1918, in Haarlemmermeer, a tailor named Johannes “Hannes” Verboom — twenty-four, born in Ter Aar, kleermaker by trade — married Leentje Vriesman, and that year opened the barber shop on the Kerkweg the family remembers. The one document that would seal Hannes as Suzanna’s father beyond doubt — her own September 1918 Ter Aar birth certificate — has not yet been pulled, so this page names him as her father on strong evidence rather than absolute proof, and says so. (See the Notes.)

The riverside Verbooms — Ter Aar back to Sliedrecht

Ter Aar ← Sliedrecht & Hardinxveld · the riverside Verbooms

Hannes Verboom was himself the son of a Ter Aar family that had come, a generation or two earlier, from the riverside villages downstream.

His father — Suzanna’s paternal grandfather — was Pieter Verboom, born in Ter Aar on 7 March 1866, who worked as a brugwachter and wegwerker (a bridge-keeper and road-man) and died about 1941. On 11 July 1889, at Nieuwveen, Pieter married Suzanna Kooij, born at Nieuwveen on 24 April 1863, who outlived him, dying at Ter Aar on 21 May 1943. (It is for this grandmother, very likely, that Suzanna was named.)

Pieter’s own father had come from elsewhere. He was Johannis Verboom, born in Sliedrecht about 1824 — one of the riverside dredging-and-shipbuilding villages strung along the Beneden-Merwede, southeast of Rotterdam — who by the 1880s was living and working in Ter Aar. On 6 August 1852, at Sliedrecht, Johannis married Pietje van den Bos. The marriage record names his parents; her father it leaves blank, recording only her mother, Lena van den Bos.

Johannis’s parents close this verified stretch of the line. They were Jan Verboom, born at Hardinxveld about 1792, and Pietje van Wijngaarden, born at Sliedrecht about 1802. Their marriage, on 10 November 1825 at Sliedrecht, is the single richest document in the Verboom branch: it records that Jan was already a widower (of a first wife, Aartje Meerkerk), and it names all four of the next generation up — Jan’s parents as Teunis Verboom and Cornelia Slagboom, and Pietje’s as Johannis van Wijngaarden and Neeltje Nederlof. Those four, born around the 1760s and 1770s in the Hardinxveld–Sliedrecht riverside, are the deepest Verbooms the documents reach. This was the front line of the old Dutch war against water. The villages strung along the Beneden-Merwede lived by the river, their men the diggers, dredgers, and dike-builders who deepened the shipping channels, sank the willow-and-stone mattresses that armoured the banks, and kept the low polders behind them from drowning. This was the same waterland that, a few miles upstream at Kinderdijk, set nineteen windmills turning against the flood day and night. What these particular Verbooms did in that world the surviving records do not say; no document in hand assigns any of them a trade, so none is claimed here — but it was a country that lived or drowned by the river, and they were born into the work of holding it back. Learn more about Kinderdijk and its windmills →

Suzanna’s mother — the Vriesmans and Hoflands of the northern polders

Haarlemmermeer ← Petten & Zijpe · polder-diggers & a shopkeeper

Suzanna’s mother, Leentje Vriesman, was born in Haarlemmermeer on 21 February 1895 — and Haarlemmermeer is itself a clue, because in 1852 it had been a lake, drained dry and thrown open to settlers. Learn more about the draining of the Haarlemmermeer → The families who farmed and dug it were incomers, and Leentje’s were no exception: they came down from the coastal villages of the far north of Noord-Holland.

Her parents married at Haarlemmermeer on 14 June 1893: Jacob Vriesman, a labourer born in Haarlemmermeer, and Adriaantje Grevenstuk. Jacob’s own father, the elder Jacob Vriesman, had come from Petten, the dune village on the North Sea coast; the family’s working life there is written right into the records. On 14 September 1828 at Petten, Cornelis Vriesman — Suzanna’s great-great-great-grandfather, and a dijkwerker, a dike-worker — married Stijntje Hoofd, a winkelierster (shopkeeper) born across the line at Zijpe. The marriage names their parents: Cornelis was the son of Jacob Vriesman (a labourer) and Neeltje Kroon; Stijntje the daughter of Cornelis Hoofd, a verver (painter), and Trijntje Duijnmeijer.

The other strand of this side, the Hoflands, runs through Antje Hofland, who married into the Vriesmans: she was the daughter of Jan Fekke Hofland, a boerenknecht (farmhand) born at Barsingerhorn about 1796, and Guurtje Rijding, a dienstmeid (housemaid) of Zijpe. These were working coastal people — dike-workers, farmhands, a shopkeeper, a village painter, every trade small enough to pack and useful enough to keep — who answered the call of the newly drained Haarlemmermeer and moved south to break new polder ground, exactly as Suzanna’s Lakeman in-laws’ ancestors had once broken the Beemster.

The island side — the Grevenstuks and Tiggelmans of Goeree-Overflakkee

Goeree-Overflakkee · the island Grevenstuks & Tiggelmans

Suzanna’s mother’s mother, Adriaantje Grevenstuk, came from a different Holland again — the flat farming-and-fishing islands of Goeree-Overflakkee, in the river-mouth delta of Zuid-Holland, where her uncommon surname is found and almost nowhere else. Learn more about Goeree-Overflakkee →

Adriaantje’s parents, Bernardus Grevenstuk and Leentje Tiggelman, married at Dirksland on 2 February 1871; Leentje had been born nearby at Den Bommel on 2 June 1852. The marriage records name the generation above: Bernardus was the son of Johan Bernardus Grevenstuk and Willempje van Eck; Leentje the daughter of Hendrik Tiggelman and Adriaantje Koppenaal.

That Tiggelman–Koppenaal marriage, on 14 May 1837 at Middelharnis, reaches back further than any other single record in this whole family, naming not just parents but a full rank of great-great-grandparents of the island line (the lineage table and the Notes set out the full roll). The surname appears as both Tiggelman and Tichelman in the records — the same family, the spelling not yet settled in that era. These island people, born through the later 1700s, are the deepest the maternal records reach: a cluster of delta families rooted in the small world of Goeree-Overflakkee long before any of them dreamed of a daughter in Calgary.

Where the Verbooms meet the Lakemans

Calgary · where the needle came ashore

Suzanna Verboom married Rienk Lakeman Sr. and carried every branch on this page into the polder-and-Indies line she married into, and on to Thomas Cheesman and his three children. Her own chapter — the needle, the shears, and the Ter Aar household she came from — is told in the Lakeman story →. The deep Dutch ground behind her is set out above.

Lineage at a glance

Confidence tiers: Verified — anchored to at least one primary civil-registration akte or DTB parish entry. Probable — consistent across records or named in a related akte, but the individual’s own primary record is not yet in hand. Living memory / family record — recent enough to rest on direct testimony.