G2G: Choose surname for Jannetje Van Egmont or Van Voorhoudt and family

Question

Jannetie was a Dutch-born (born 1633) settler in New Netherland (arrived 1643) and the wife of Jacob Janse Schermerhorn (married 1650). Her name is variously recorded as Jannetie Egmont, Jannetie Van Voorhout, Jannetie Van Vourhoudt, Jannetje Van Egmont, Jannetje Egmont Van Voorhout, and other variant spellings. I have found 5 Wikitree profiles for her: Egmont-2, Van_Egmont-5, Van_Voorhoudt-1, VanVoorhoudt-1, and VanVoorhoudt-2. Her father is in Wikitree as Van_Egmont-6 and Van_Voorhoudt-2; his name is reportedly documented as Cornelise Segertse Van Egmont in 1643 and as Cornelis Segersen Van Voorhout in 1662. Egmont may have been a family name and Voorhout may be the place he was most recently from. One of Jannetje's brothers signed his name Cornelis Cornelise Van Voorhout, another went by Claes Cornelise Egmont, and a third brother apparently used the surname Segers.

It would be very nice to be able to merge Jannetje's multiple profiles (also the multiple profiles for her father), but that requires a decision on a surname. Is there a standard logic to be followed here?

Comments

Welcome Ellen!  Have you found the New Netherland Settlers project yet? Check out the project page (especially the section on the "Approval System" - an overview is there, along with a link to detailed instructions).  Give Kimball a holler if you'd like to join.

To answer your question - You've done a start on deciding by initiating a G2G discussion, identifying duplicate profiles, and posting to their pages. I've protected the duplicates you identified and put them in the Compare stage of the Approval System. I'll set them as an unmerged match in a minute.

Before we get to merging her profiles, we need to merge her father's. (I set his duplicates - Van_Egmont-6 and Van_Voorhoudt-2 - in an unmerged match.)

Looking at the source you cited in your post to their profiles (thank you!!), it seems the father went by Van Egmont and she went by Van Voorhoudt. Is that your conclusion? If so, propose here that Van Egmont-6 should be the final WikiTree ID and if no objection by xx date we'll "make it so" (I used to give 2 weeks, but if there is a need for discussion, you'll usually get a response within a day or two... maybe give it 5 days?).  Same for the daughter with Van Voorhoudt-1. (Pax Philip :D *)

Cheers, Liz

* Philip van der Walt feels strongly that Dutch-born people do not use Van (they still lived there at birth - they weren't yet from there). Since there is an Egmont  profile, you could propose that one (Egmont-2) for her final WikiTree ID if you agree.

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initially forgot to add the links to my previous post:

New Netherland Settlers project page: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:New_Netherland_Settlers

especially the Approval System: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:New_Netherland_Settlers#Project_Protected_Profiles

Cheers, Liz

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p.s. I also posted a link to this question on all the profiles. It's connected to only the one you asked it from, and even then, profile managers aren't notified with an e-mail when a G2G question is posted and sometimes miss that there's a question/discussion. Comments posted on a profile are sent via e-mail to profile managers. Cheers, Liz

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Thanks for the advice and assistance.

At birth (in Holland) Jannetje's surname would have been the patronymic Cornelisse. Her first child was born when she was 19, indicating that she became a Schermerhorn by marriage at around age 18, so she didn't have much time to establish an identity connected to any birth surname. The only reason to need a decision on her last name at birth is because WikiTree is set up to index each profile by a unique last name at birth -- and I would prefer not to build out more of her children (I'm descended from at least two of her 9 children, so I care about this) until she and her husband both have just one profile.

The father (Cornelis Segertse _____) is a different story. He used multiple surnames. When he entered into a contract with the patroon of Rensselaerwyck in 1643, he was listed as Cornelise Segertse Van Egmont. Although the Van_Voorhoudt-2 profile gives his date of death as 1652 (source of information not indicated), he is reported elsewhere to have had a will written in 1662 in which he was Cornelis Segersen Van Voorhout. On balance, I think that Van Egmont is the best choice for his surname, as it is the surname associated with the earliest record of his name. (I also have found some indication of van Egmont, Egmont, or Van Egmont being used by at least one of his grandsons.)

For Jannetje's surname, I suggest that the most logical solution is to use the same surname that is used for her father -- i.e., Van Egmont.

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Thanks for posting on the other profiles, Liz. When I've posted comments on multiple profiles previously, I got the message that I was blocked from posting any more comments for 24 hours to prevent spamming. As a result, I've largely lost interest in posting comments on profiles.

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oh my! I thought the 10-post limit was for private messages only, but it makes sense that it's for all posting (and I now realize what some of my fellow greeters were talking about before!).

Thanks for letting me know.  I monitor G2G posts tagged new_netherland.  I'll keep an eye out for naming posts that need to be spammed, er, pointed out on many profiles.

Cheers, Liz

P.S. Have you had a chance to look at the detailed instructions for the Approval System? Any questions?

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I originally posted this question because I was aware of the New Netherland project and the effort to find agreement on names.

I'm not sure what the project protocol has been for advancing discussion of names, but I hope that after a month of silence (during which time both sets of profiles have been in the Merge Compare category) we can move forward on this one. From the above dsicussion, the "Egmont" name seems to be the best choice for the LNAB for both the father (Van_Egmont-6 and Van_Voorhoudt-2) and daughter (Egmont-2, Van_Egmont-5, Van_Voorhoudt-1, VanVoorhoudt-1, and VanVoorhoudt-2). Although "Van Egmont" is used in the records, "Egmont" is probably better because (1) it appears that Egmont was not a place these people were from, but had some history as a family surname and (2) the Dutch didn't typically treat "Van" as part of a name.

Having been advised that I should not post merge proposals for these project protected profiles, I don't know what to do next.

Answer 1

My standard logic would be to tip-toe away from that profile and let it wait for some one that is more knowledgeable about that family to make those decisions.

Answer 2

In my "comment" above (I now see that comments don't send new pings to users), I proposed to settle on Egmont as the LNAB for both Cornelis and Jannetje. Since neither of Cornelis' profiles has Egmont as the LNAB, it's not obvious which profile should be proposed as the final WikiTree ID. (I surely wouldn't want to create a third profile for him!)

Would it be acceptable to the NNS project to identify one of the two profiles as the destination, with a note that the LNAB should be changed? Or should I boldly change the LNAB in one of the profiles before posting a proposed merge?

Comments

Found them on a passenger list: http://immigrantships.net/v10/1600v10/wapenvanrensselaerswyck16440300.html

Looks like her older brothers were van Voorhout, dad was van Voorhout aka van Egmont.

Your choice of Egmont sounds good (although (2) doesn't apply in WikITree - if van is used, we put it in the LNAB field for New Netherland settlers).  Have you checked the ancestors to ensure no other conflicts? 

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There are no known ancestors for the father, Van_Egmont-6 or Van_Voorhoudt-2, who was born in Holland in 1599.

As noted earlier here, his male children (in America) apparently used several different surnames (there was no standard surname for that generation).

Update (26 September 2014): An online family tree at http://www.geni.com/people/Cornelis-Segerse-van-Egmond/6000000001671151573 gives the names van Egmond and van Egmont for Cornelis' father and mother (respectively). However, the only cited source is the 1914 Schermerhorn genealogy, which has no information about the parents of Cornelis.

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I have proposed a merge for  the two Cornelis profiles (http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Van_Voorhoudt-2 and http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Van_Egmont-6 ). I moved both of them into the "Merge Pending" category because adoption of the Egmont surname means that a new LNAB will need to be created.

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Oh man, I could swear that I checked the NYSM site for these names for this question but missed it somehow. I think these are the people that you're discussing, Breghie being the key word.

http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/e/jaclegmont.html

Hope this helps!

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Thanks for the research. The subject of that short article (Jacob Claese Egmont) is a grandson of Cornelis Segertse Egmont (Van Voorhout). He was the son of Cornelis' son Claes Cornelise, and thus is a nephew of the Jannetje whose name is in the title of this discussion.

There is an extensive and reasonably well documented (for the era) treatise on this family by Richard Schermerhorn, Jr., published in 1915 in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, online at http://books.google.com/books?id=R9cUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA343  . As I stated earlier, one of Cornelis Segertse's three sons used the surname Egmont (that was Claes Cornelise, the father of Jacob Claese Egmont), one used the surname Van Voorhout (that was Cornelis Cornelise), and the third son was known by the surname Segers.

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Ellen, I reversed your two Merge Pendings that you set on the father back to Merge Compare. Sorry, but you cannot propose a Merge Pending into a Merge Pending. A Merge Pending must ONLY be set into an NNS. Otherwise, the merge completion LNAB will just end up entirely random, depending on from where the merge gets completed.

And of course that would then defeat the entire system, and make pointles the enitre G2G on this.

That said, I think http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Van_Egmont-6 needs to be the NNS. Based on the earliest record you found, in which he is indeed named as van Egmont. The idea that he shoud be simply Egmont seems a bit too speculative to me. Van does not necessarily need to refer to from or of or in a place, but it could also be an occupation, a farm-type enclave, or something else lost to history. But to make a conclusion that it would be a family surname without the van begs the question that if any such surname existed, it surely would have been used in his time, without the van prefix.

Essentially this NNS process is only the first round of deciding LNAB. At some point WikiTree may move away from using LNAB as ID, and develop a proper patronymic field. So for now, we should avoid creation of new profiles, and choose the *best* from among what we have existing, as long as one of them is an acceptable choice. For this father, Van Egmont is acceptable as a form, and appears to me to be the earliest and most widely used name closest to his birth. So my vote is that we make Van Egmont-6 the NNS. 

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For details about Pending/Compare etc see http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:New_Netherland_Settlers#Approval_System for the short version and, for details, see http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:New_Netherland_Settlers_-_Approval_System

And just to clarify - don't go with a bad option just because it's the least bad. Create a new profile if none of the exiting profiles are acceptable (for instance if you only had two - Van meter and Van METER - neither is good, so create a Van Meter or van Meter... if you'd rather van Meter but Van Meter exists, go with Van Meter).  Cheers, Liz