Is it time to deconflate Jan/Johannes Ostrom?

Question

This profile is a conflation of two brothers, who married 2 sisters.  I feel ready to create a new profile for Jan, and move the children to their correct parents, but I wanted to give members a chance for comment, before jumping in.  These are part of a large and confusing family.  Please review the comments on the profile.  See Ostrom Records, [[Space:Ostrom_Records|Ostrom Records]] https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Ostrom_Records for the separation of the 2 families.

Answer 1

I am glad you have pursued this, Mark. It is now evident that Johannes and Jan were different men who married sisters.

One unresolved concern I have has to do with the relationship between Johannes and Jan. Where is the evidence that they were brothers, and not cousins? Even if we accept the possibility that parents would name one son Johannes and another one Jan, it seems very unlikely that two sons with variants of the same name would have been very close in age.

My experience trying to sort out different men from this family named Hendrick (or variants) -- see https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/375639/hendrick-oosteroom-various-spellings-1730s-1740s -- left me with the impression that there probably are more than a few members of this family whose life records (or rather, some of whose life records) are missing, or exist only in archives I have not seen. (FWIW, I convinced myself that my ancestor named Hendrick Ostrom probably was the son of Jan and Blandina, although the baptism date currently shown on https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Oosteroom-9 for their son Hendrick is not the one that I documented.)

So I agree with separating Johannes who married Jannejte Reljie from Jan who married Jannetje's sister Blandina, but in the absence of a baptism record for Johannes, I think we need to dig into other records to figure out the relationship between Jan and Johannes. (Who witnessed the baptisms of their children? Whose children did they witness the baptisms of? Which churches mention them in their records? What affinities show up in land records and probate records?) The Reljie family seems to be prominent among the witnesses to baptisms, which does not give us much help in telling the Ostroms apart.

Comments

I believe the baptism we have is for Johannes, not Jan. I agree that their brotherhood is in doubt, but the extraordinarily close relations, as demonstrated by the concurrent baptisms and mutual sponsorships makes a close relationship likely.  I haven't found a baptism for Jan, and a relative who has studied this line extensively hasn't found one, either.

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Yes, I was confused earlier when I said it was Johannes who lacked a record.

However, since the vast majority of the content in the existing Oosteroom-9 profile is about Jan, who married Blandina Relyea, I think (for reasons of efficiency) that the profile should be repurposed to represent him, and the new profile should be created to represent Johannes, the one who has a baptism record.

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I'm inclined, from a lifetime of hard work, to plod along, following the primary line.  I am willing to create a new profile, for Jan, and leave the existing profile for Johannes, for whom we have a birth record.  Jan is a bit more ethereal, in that we don't have birth or marriage records for him, while birth records for his children are numerous. Based on the baptisms of his children, and his frequent appearance in these records, and those of his presumed siblings, I would like to create a new profile, with uncertain parentage, who is certainly connected with these people, despite the lack of records that establish his parentage.

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Since Jan and Blandina are connected to all those kids, I think it would not only be less work, but also would be less disruptive to descendants if the existing profile becomes Jan and the birth record is moved to the new profile.

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In support of the notion that Jan and Johannes could be brothers, in the 1968 NYGBR article The Van Blarcom Family of New Jersey, by George Olin Zabriskie, I read (in reference to Hans Lubbertsen, son of Lubbert Gysbertsen): 

It has been asserted that, with an older surviving brother named Jan, this Hans could not belong to the family. This is untrue. Hans, otherwise Johannes, is a different name in Dutch from Jan, although both are frequently anglicised to John.

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I hadn't thought about the effect on descendants.  It makes more sense to me, now.

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From the rootsweb archive: https://mlarchives.rootsweb.com/listindexes/emails?listname=ostrom&page=3

Jan OSTROM - 1705 - 1765 - married to BLANDINA (Claudjine) RELJE ..................*** one of the three Ostrom brothers who married one of the three Relje sisters*** If more information about any of these lines is needed, please get back to me through the Ostrom List Sandra Horwat

I'll contact the Ostrom Google group that replaced the rootsweb thread and see if anybody has additional records.

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Not a reliable source, of course, but there may be a basis for it.

I also ran across a 1705 birth date for Jan (I forget where -- probably on some online family tree) in the last couple of days.

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Roger Ostrom has pointed me to the discussion of the family, in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. United States: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1909, pg 249, The Dutcher Family, Walter Griffin. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_York_Genealogical_and_Biographic/MOgnAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 .

This has been under discussion since 1909.

Answer 2

I remember thinking about the similar names way back when, but did not have the resources to be able to do anything.

It would seem that yDNA might help, if there are suitable Ostroms available for testing, but I don't have names of other suitable testees. I have not noticed anybody else on WikiTree. I have not done a yDNA test as the cost didn't warrant the seemingly limited benefit.

Steve.

Comments

Interesting thought, but we can't discriminate these guys by DNA. There is no doubt that these two men were closely related (if not brothers, they were no more distant than first cousins, and they had the same paternal ancestral line), so yDNA won't distinguish them.

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YDna might be possible, given enough testers and the luck of a Y mutation at the right time. However I have read that Johannes only had daughters ...

Answer 3

I think we're ready, if nobody has any objections, to add a profile for Johannes and make Jannetjen his spouse. Then attach the correct children, based on the church records collected at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Ostrom_Records.

Comments

Go forward, Mark!