LNAB for some Dutch Mayflower Descendants?

Question

Can someone help with some Dutch Last names at birth?

I want to create profiles for some children and grandchildren of Moses Fletcher who was a Mayflower passenger. They were born and died in the Netherlands. I would like to get the Last name at birth as correct as I can.

Parent profiles: All the information I have is on the parent profiles. I did find some of the baptism records. There are links to these.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fletcher-10094

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Koet-4

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Koet-2

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Koet-5

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fletcher-10098

Thank you.

Answer 1

On the (pre)marriage record ("ondertrouw") between John Fletcher and Josina Sacharias his name is listed as "Jan Moysesz," born in "Santwits, Engelant," and states that he was the son of "Moses Fleteker."  The surname "Fletcher" doesn't seem to have stuck to John, the son of Moses Fletcher, even if that was his LNAB.  John's son, Sacharias, appears to use the patronymic "Jansz," or some variation of that, in his own records.  It's a bit of a toss-up what Sacharias LNAB should be because his baptism record provides his given name and the names of his parents, Jan Moses and Sijntge Sacharias.  His LNAB could be either "Jansz" or "Jansen" based on other records from the period between 1645 - 1695.

Per English naming conventions, a wife usually takes the surname of her huband when the become married.  In Dutch naming conventions a woman keeps her LNAB throughout her life, but may be referred to as the wife of (husband).  If Josina moved to, and died in, England then her current last name may be Fletcher, but if she died in the Netherlands then her current last name should be Sacharias, the same as her LNAB.

It's going to be a similar story for the other Dutch-born grandchildren of Moses Fletcher.  Based on the few records I looked at, they were using patronymics rather than a family surname, so you'll get LNABs that change each generation.  The Koets family may be an exception; here the name appears to be a surname for at least two sequential generations.

Comments

Marriage of Jan Moses and Josina Sacharias.

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Baptism of Sacharias Jansz.

Answer 2

I like WieWasWie and Erfgoed Leiden (Leiden Heritage) for most of my Dutch sourcing.I'll look into it and see if there is anything there.

Comments

There are a number of scanned documents available on www.openarch.nl also.  Search for "j* *ac*ri*s" (without quotes) and filter for the place "Leiden".

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Thank you I hadn't thought to use wildcards

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I found quite a few records that have some variation of "Sacharias Jansen" in Leiden during the 1600s.  It appears as if there were at least three different people with that name in Leiden during that 100 year period.  One of them would have been Sacharias, the son of Jan Moses, i.e. John Fletcher from Sandwich, England.

Answer 3

This reminds me of some of the name-related issues that the New Netherland Settlers Project deals with. English settlers in New Netherland had their names "Dutchified" by Dutch-speaking clerics, and sometimes English and Scottish surnames were misinterpreted as patronymic names (for example, Lindsay became Leendertsz, meaning son of Leendert, and Davis became Davids, meaning son of David). And the authors of published genealogies have a history of helpfully standardizing the family's surname, which means that some long-ago ancestors are assigned names they wouldn't have recognized -- and descendants searching for their records may be unable to find them because the names are so different from what's been handed down to them.

I've become a fanatic about trying to record every known name variant for a person (first and last names) somewhere in the profile data fields, so the person is more likely to show up in a name search. The "Other Nicknames" and "Other Last Names" lists should also include any names that modern genealogies have assigned the person, even if the person was never recorded with that name.