Dutch term – Kwartierherhaling

Kwartierherhaling, literally "repetition of quarters," means pedigree collapse: the situation where the same people appear in multiple places in your pedigree chart. That means you descend from the same person or couple in different ways. If your ancestors are from small towns in the Netherlands, sooner or later you'll run into kwartierherhaling. In general, the more recently your ancestor lived in a small village, the higher the collapse. On my father's side, who was from the village of … [Read more...]

The illegitimate, doubly baptized, incestuous orphan

Sometimes you read records and you wonder how much bad luck one person can handle. While doing research for a client I came across the following baptism in a transcription of the Roman-Catholic baptismal records for Venlo in 1750-1760:1 1751 13 november Anna Elisabetha conditionaliter rebaptizata est filia spuria Andreae Ketels et Gertrudis Podor qui sunt consanguinei in secundo consanguinitatis gradu: susce- perunt Jacobus Podor et Anna Elisabetha van Cauwenbergh As all Roman … [Read more...]

Dutch term – Kwartierverlies

The term kwartierverlies literally means 'loss of quarters,' where 'quarters' refer to a person's ancestors. The usual English translation is 'pedigree collapse.' Kwartierverlies occurs when the parents of a child are related to each other, so the same ancestors occur in multiple places in the child's pedigree chart. An example of pedigree collapse is the Roerdink family from Winterswijk, where first cousin marriages happened multiple times. Read more about the Roerdink example of pedigree … [Read more...]

Worst case of pedigree collapse ever?

My father's side of the family comes from a small village in the east of Gelderland called Winterswijk. Because so many of his ancestors came from that place, I am reconstructing its entire population. Doing such a one-place-study has given me a deeper understanding of life in that village and allowed me to make some interesting discoveries and observations along the way. Roerdink family from Winterswijk One of the families I am researching, the Roerdinks, belonged to the farmer elite of … [Read more...]