The Archives and de Oldhoven

Today was a fun day.  I spent several hours at the Leeuwarden city historic archives and at TRESOAR where the records of Friesland are housed.  I was tracking down a mysterious notation in the public records that seemed to indicate that one of my female ancestors had divorced her husband in 1845.  Turned out to be very true and I was able to obtain a copy of the original judgment.  I haven’t been able to do a full translation but the people at TRESOAR were wonderfully helpful and gave me a good feel for the juicy details of the judgment. 

Both the city and provincial archive buildings are in the very heart of medieval Leeuwarden and the old city buildings mix in with high rises in a delicious blend of old and new.

Leeuwarden is built around a series of canals and the boats vie with bicycles to be the transportation of choice.  In the historic district there are shops and cafes all along the canals. 

The archive buildings are right across the street from de Oldhoven, a medieval tower with a fun story. 

In the 9th Century a Catholic Church dedicated to Saint Vitus was built on a terp (artificial land mound) that would eventually become the city of Leeuwarden in Friesland, Netherlands. The church survived and in 1529 the citizens of Leeuwarden determined to build a tower for the church.  Now, the neighboring city of Groningen had just built a huge tower and the Leeuwarden folk demanded that the new church tower be even taller than the one in Groningen. During construction of the brick and Bentheim sandstone tower, it began to sag and the builders tried various ways to compensate. Unable to keep the tower upright, the project was abandoned in 1532 or 1533. In 1595 the church itself was demolished but the tower remains. It still sags and in fact now leans more than the Tower of Pisa.

When my son Justin spotted this story on Facebook, he wanted to know if the terp I mentioned had anything to do with the family name Terpstra.  So for those who never read the Terpstra family history and those who have forgotten some of the details (Justin!), I’m pulling up the story of the origin of the Terpstra family name. 

The people of Fryslan had never used surnames.  They had traditionally used a strict system of patronymics for naming their children.  A child’s name was paired with his or her father’s name and there were strict rules about the given name.  The first son was named after his paternal grandfather.  So if the father’s name were Gerrit and the grandfather’s name were Wybren, the first son would be named Wybren Gerrits.  The second son was named after his maternal grandfather.  The third son was named after his paternal great-grandfather.  The fourth son was named after his maternal great-grandfather.  Girls were named after their female ancestors using the same pattern.  Exceptions were made so that the names of babies who had died could be used for the next child of that gender.  Children whose mothers died in childbirth received her name regardless of gender.

Then in 1811 Napoleon ruled the Netherlands and he decreed that everyone had to have a surname.  The head of each family was required to travel to a designated city and register the new surname at city hall.  One of the branches of our family chose the surname “Terpstra”.  The “stra” ending of names is only found in Fryslan (and occasionally in Groningen) and means to originate from somewhere, in this case from the “terps”, the dwelling mounds that saved the Frysians from the rising sea.   

The ancestors of the Frysians colonized the coastal clay districts of current Fryslan and Groningen about 700 B.C.  In 500 B.C. the sea level began to rise, flooding was rampant, and the first terpbuilding period began.  A second terpbuilding period dated from 200 B.C. to 50 B.C.   In 250 A.D. the sea level rose so dramatically that it became impossible to continue living in the coastal areas.  People disappeared from the coastal lands and the area remained mostly uninhabited until 400 A.D. when the sea finally stopped rising.  A third terpgeneration dates from 700 A.D.

The terps were flat mounds built by our Iron Age ancestors on lands prone to flooding.  The terp was an artificial habitation platform on which they erected houses and in which they buried their dead.  Some terps were huge, large enough for several families.  When floods threatened the lands, the ancient Frysians crowded their livestock and perishable belongings onto the top of the terps.  

Flooding continued to be a life-threatening problem for the Frysians until the Middle Ages when an adequate system of dikes, canals and windmills was built.  The dikes kept the sea at bay and some terps were now miles from the waters.  The earth of the terps was very rich and some terps were leveled to provide soil for farmlands once covered by the sea.  

Terps were built throughout the coastal clay district, the prime land of the Netherlands; it was arable young land excellent for growing crops and raising food animals.  This was the first land to be inhabited in Fryslan and was the same land inhabited in 1811 by the newly-named Terpstra family.