Last updated February 1, 2014
Genealogy page of Jan de Kloe
Introduction
Born in The Netherlands out of Dutch parents, the family name always puzzled me because it does not really mean anything and even does not sound very Dutch. There was a story about being from French descent but in the family nobody could substantiate this. As a youth I decided to one day figure out the origin of the name.
Then, later in life (and before the invention of internet) I started doing research which took me to the city and church archives while contacting people left and right with phonetically the same name.
Researching the family history is a time consuming hobby. On and off, I am more and less active in this research and it can happen that it sleeps for years. Never mind – the history does not change, there will just be more of it. In time I managed to trace the ancestors. Not alone, since on the path to the answers I encountered a couple of people that had also done investigations, while in turn I gave a head start to others who are even more motivated to find out about the ancestry than I am myself.
I found out that a French army captain of the Huguenot persuasion by the name of Daniel du Cloux (born ca. 1623) left Catholic France and settled in the Dutch city of Delft, selling his military skills to the Prince of Orange.
Picture “View of Delft” by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) [JdK1]
The reason for Daniel to leave his native country was a religious one. Huguenots were a persecuted Protestant minority in Catholic France.
The Huguenot immigration, which began in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued until the French Revolution, brought thousands of Huguenots to England, the United States, Holland, Germany and Switzerland. A rough calculation, based on the records still existing of church registers and acts of naturalization and the records still existing in France, places their numbers between 1550 and 1789 at a conservative estimate of 250,000.
When Daniel came to Holland, he was a young man of about 20 years old and supposedly he brought his wife from France because they were registered as a couple the first time his name appears. Her name was Marie Dalichang, after the name of a city in southern France: d’Alixan. Their children were all born in Delft.
The French city where they came from lies in the French Ardennes on the Meuse river and is close to what is today the French-Belgian border. With his military tradition it can be assumed that he served at the fortified castle of that city – the largest of its kind in Europe.
Pictures[JdK4] of the Sedan castle
Construit vers 1424 , le château fort de Sedan est le plus grand château fort d'Europe avec ses 35 000 m² de superficie.
Avec sa position stratégique sur la frontière de l'Est de la France, il fut sans cesse agrandi, renforcé, modernisé par les puissants La Marck, ducs de Bouillon et princes souverains de Sedan. Remarquablement conservées, leurs réalisations sont encore en place aujourd'hui et témoignent de façon magistrale de l'évolution de l'architecture militaire entre le XVe siècle et le Second Empire.
As soon as next generations establish in other townships, the name gets clobbered. We see that while the family branch that kept Delft as its place of residence still maintains the ‘du Clou’ spelling because records were copied from previous ones. A son of Daniel, Isaac du Cloux (born April 20, 1642) in 1662 married in the nearby village of Nootdorp. In the marriage record we see him mentioned as Isaack de Clouw while there are three other spellings of the family name for this person. There are a couple of reasons for inconsistent spelling:
· The person who writes is always right. Reverend: “In this church I decide how to spell your name. I studied for it”.
· Illiteracy existed of course. Reverend: “How do you spell your name?”, Isaac: “Gee, I don’t know, you tell me”.
· In times of animosity between countries – and the Dutch have had their share of wars with the big three (England, France, and most recently Germany) – it is quite unattractive to have a name obviously linked to the country that is the enemy of the moment. Phonetically, ‘Kloe’ sounds exactly the same as French ‘Clou’ or ‘Cloux’. For English speaking people this would be close to ‘Kloo’ or ‘Clew’.
In some areas in Europe, the article ‘de’ in front of a name means aristocracy. This is still the case in some names, and so it is in ‘de Clou(x)’. In the Netherlands it is just an article. When your job was baker at the time the names were fixed, your name was ‘the baker’ or ‘de Bakker’ in Dutch. In occupied French territory, when Napoleon decided that population registration was no longer a matter for the church but for the state, you would probably have been inscribed as ‘Debacquer’, because the city registrar only knew French. He had studied. He knew. Especially in Belgium one encounters many examples of French spelling in typically non-French names.
Small world (This happened on August 9, 2006)
Today, something absolutely incredible happened. I am invited to play in Reno, Nevada at the Sierra Nevada Guitar Festival by a guy I met at the festival of the Guitar Foundation of America, 2005 where I gave a workshop. He had arranged that I could stay with an elderly couple, both classical music lovers. The man Matthew picked me up at the airport where he waited in the baggage claim area with a placard with my name on it, as we had agreed by email. After lunch during which we had talked about the things one talks about at a first encounter we got into history and Hope asked me if I was interested to see her family tree. Ask a guy who researched his ancestry as far back as about 1500 and the answer is of course yes. She said she wanted to show me that because there were some Dutch names in there. I told her that the sister of one of my ancestors had in 1601 married a man named De Forest and they had moved to New Amsterdam. She then said, there is a De Forest in the tree (pun not intended) and walking over to the wall where the framed schematic hung, I see on top of the tree my 14th generation grandfather Nicaise du Cloux. At the discovery of the fact that I had met my new cousin, I instantly got goose bumps on both arms. Small world isn't it? I have my laptop with me and showed the many details which I have of those families, how many children, what they did for a living etc. That document of my tree counts 281 pages and I quickly put it on a stick and copied it to Matt's computer.
The new cousin, by Jan de Kloe
Cousin Hope lives in
Jean de
Jessé married Marie du Cloux who was the daughter of Nicaise du Cloux. Nicaise is therefore the CPA (Common Paternal Ancestor) of Hope and myself.
As the line between my 14th generation
grandfather Nicaise du Cloux is sufficiently documented, I only give the line
of Hope. Her maiden name is Almy, which I think is originally from
Nicaise must have been born around 1540 in what is
Marie du Cloux (generation 2) was baptized on Nov. 17, 1577
and she was the fourth child, the first daughter after Jean, Daniel and
Estienne. As the first two children were born in Château Regnault, and the
later ones in
It was not until 1629 that this area became a part of the French kingdom and it had been a separate sovereignty until then.
This map from 1687 shows the border of the Champenoise
territory with Château Regnault (Spelled as Chasteau Renauld) described here as
3 lieues downstream from Sedan, so about 8.3 miles (13.3 km) when my conversion
tables are right but it is today 40 km by car and 32 km by bike from where the
river Semoy (top right hand corner) joins the Meuse (Maas). This map is
actually little more than a symbolic representation. The
After Marie, there was a daughter Magdeleine, a daughter
Françoise and a son Louis, all born in
Marie du Cloux had these children:
Marie, born 1602
Jean, born 1604
Henri, born 1606
Elisabeth, born
1607 baptized Nov. 1, 1607 in
Rachel, born 1608 or 1609 born in Montcornet
David, born
1608 baptized Dec. 11, 1608 in
Anne, born 1611
Nicaise, born 1613
Jesse, born 1615
Isaac, born 1616
Philippe, born
1620?
The grandchild of Daniel (generation 3) who was also called Daniel (generation 5) moved to The Netherlands, probably because that is what many Huguenots did and this must have been shortly before 1642 when his first child was born in the city of Delft. Shortly, because he had at that moment finished the military academy (I assume) with the rank of captain and he was married with no children. It could also be that he met his future wife Maria Dalichang in The Netherlands as there was a large French Huguenot contingent.
We concentrate on Rachel (generation 3) because she is a
maternal ancestor of Hope. We do not have an exact date of birth or a date that
she was baptized. What is puzzling is that physically she is unlikely to be the
twin sister of David as he was baptized in
Other sources refer to her date of birth as 1609 which means that she must be younger than David. This is much more realistic when following the birth rhythm of this family.
While some documents mention a Montcordet in the Picardie region,
this is questionable. I have only found one village by the name of Montcordet which
is a mere 12km walk from Château Regnault so that is probably the one we are
interested in. Picardie was a lot larger in 1600 than it is today so it could
still be true. Today, the village is in the same region as
The genealogical “Society of the descendants of Johannes de
la Montagne” (SDJM) (www.delamontagne.org)
gives a different village for her place of birth: Montcornet which is in the
Aisne département, 83km from
Follows the link from Marie du Cloux all the way down to my remote cousin Hope:
Generation 2
Jessé de Forest x Marie du Cloux
Generation 3
Rachel de
She married Dr. Johannes de la Montagne (1595-1670) on Dec. 12, 1626. At that moment, he was 31 while she was only 15.
SDJM gives marriage date as November 28, 1626 and that she was about seventeen.
SDJM gives 1643 as the year she died.
Generation 4
This couple got a son (their third child), Jan or John or
Jean Montagne, born 1632, in
He married on June 10, 1663 with Maria Vermilye (1629-1689) and she was his second wife.
Her parents were Isaac Vermeilye, born 1601 and Jacomina Jacobs.
Her grandparents were Jean Vermeille and Marie Roublay.
Generation 5
Son of John Montagne was Abraham de la Montagne, baptized March 14, 1664.
He married on March 27, 1689 with Rebecca Teunis.
Her parents
were Teunis Iden van Huyse and Jannetje Tysen van Pelt.
Her grandparents were Iden van Huyse and Trijntje Jacobs on the father’s side,
While on the mother’s side we only have a father: Matthijs Jan van Pelt.
Generation 6
Daughter of Abraham was Jane Montagne.
She married David de Voor (1693 – 1790) in 1715.
His parents were David de Voor (born 1659) and Elizabeth Jensen who had married August 25, 1689.
Her grandfather was David du Four, her grandmother Jeanne Frances who had married on July 10, 1657.
Generation 7
Daughter of David and Jane was Eliabeth de Voor
She married John Burger (born 1725) in 1741.
Generation 8
Their daughter was Susannah Burger who married in 1762
Generation 9
Her daughter was Elisabeth Anderxon (1763-1849)
Generation 10
Daughter Ann Schute (1789-1876)
Generation 11
Daughter Louisa Matilda van Eyck (1820-1878),
Generation 12
Daughter Hester Grieff (1844-1879),
Generation 13
Son Lawrence Washburn (born 1893)
Generation 14
Margaret Hope Washburn (born April 18, 1928)
She married Matthew Meek in 1978 and has a daughter from an earlier marriage.
On paper this really means that we are cousins. Could this be proven by a DNA test?
Probably it could but I have no knowledge whether such a thing is possible with the current state of science.
(Filed September 21, 2006)
To be continued…
Also see the page of my son Robert at
http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/d/e/k/Robert-L-De-kloe/