Just another WordPress site

• Home
• About
• Contact
• Site Map

Kossen Genealogy Blog

A name isn’t necessarily the same as time passes. This can be a big hurdle when you’re doing genealogy research. In this post I’ll introduce you to one of these varying name problems I encountered.

When researching my mothers ancestry I found an ancestor with the name Tombroek. In fact: Clasina Dorothea Tombroek. She’s born the first of February of 1820 in Rotterdam. That is not a well known or frequent name. It’s pretty rare. I expected things to be rather easy. Added to that the location, Rotterdam. Rotterdam is a good place to hunt for ancestors. Lot’s of archive material is available online at

Digital Familytree Rotterdam. Soon I found that this particular person was also found under names like Tombrick and Sombroek. Now the search becomes a lot wider. The nice thing about the site I mentioned is that you can actually use combinations of wild-cards to search. Searching for ?ombr*k would yield lots of results. That way you still don’t find all variations. How about Toubroek and Tonbroek?. These names you can find searching for Clasina’s Father Arnoldus.

Arnoldus is married to Elizabeth Poulus. Ahem… Also known as Elisabeth and Elizabetha, and also known as Paulus and Paulis. I’m still trying to figure out her ancestry. The problem could well be that her father’s name was written entirely differently…..All I know is that she’s probably from Kralingen, a place now part of Rotterdam… Any information is very welcome as you can imagine….

Back to the Tombroek story. The grandfather of Clasina is the first one that shows some of the origin of the name. Here one variation is Ten Broek, which means so much as ‘living close to a little stream of water’. His full name? Gerardus (or Gerrit) Tombroek / Ten Broek / Sombroek / Tenbroek / Tonbroek.

The last person I want to mention here is his father. Bernardus Tenbroek, buried August the 3rd of 1782 in Rotterdam. He is also the oldes ancestor I found in this particular part of the tree. And he is the only one is this delineage that only has one spelling variant. (as far as I can tell at this moment…)

Why does this happen? Well, it’s quite easy actually. Most people couldn’t write well so they would say their name when they had to be registered for birth, baptism, marriage or death and burial. The clerk would then write down what he had made of it. Different clerks make different spellings. Apparently these people weren’t very clear in their pronunciation… Once the ‘Burgerlijke Stand’ (civil registration) was introduced, most names froze at the spelling of the time… Still, people with different last names could well be related to each other, and to me…

I hope you liked this post, don’t hesitate to comment.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Tweet This Post