Getting to Know Great-Grandpa

Kornelis Bolhuis of
Winsum, Groningen, Netherlands

When I first started gathering information on my great-grandmother Bolhuis’ family, I knew little of her father, but I do know that everyone has a past and every grandparent was once a little boy or little girl. My first mental image of Kornelis Bolhuis was that of grandfather. I have a photograph of this bearded man. 

I knew that he died shortly before his 90^th birthday in the town of Stedum, also in the Groningen province. I knew that in his capacity as father, he encouraged his children to seek a new life in America. But I knew nothing of his childhood and the only one I knew who might have known anything was his daughter, my great-grandmother, who passed away when I was very young. I never heard any stories, his story was never told.

But over the past several years, I have been able to gather some vital statistics that, when pieced together, help me create his story. And here it is:

Kornelis was born on August 17, 1859 in the town of Winsum, Groningen, a northern province of the Netherlands. He was the third child and only son of Johannes Kornelis Bolhuis and his wife Aaltje Egberts DeVries. In July 1866, just about a month before young Kornelis’ seventh birthday, members of his family took sick and in the span of less than ten days, he lost his entire family.

His father was the first to succumb and died on the 15^th of July. His oldest sister died the next day and the second sister died the day after that. Perhaps it was first thought that the mother Aaltje would rally around, or she began to get sick later, but on the 23^rd of that month, she also died. Both sets of Kornelis’ grandparents had already died before Kornelis was even born.

He had a couple of aunts on his father’s side and an aunt and uncle on his mother’s side. He was probably raised by one or the other. He may have even been staying with one of these relatives when his family first took sick. When doing an internet search about sickness or plagues in the year 1866, I discovered that there were several epidemics of cholera worldwide and 1866 was one of those years. In order for Kornelis not to have taken ill, he probably did not drink from the same well that his family did.

Steven Johnson wrote The Ghost Map which discusses the cholera epidemic in London in 1855. In the book, the author tells the story of how one man started to figure things out which eventually led to the discovery of the bacteria itself. Before then, people thought it was something in the air. This man, Dr. John Snow, asked questions in the neighborhood as to who drank from which well and noted that often the children were sent to fetch water from the wells and mapped out which wells were making people sick. Perhaps fetching water from the well was normally a job for young Kornelis, but on that day in July he was staying with cousins and so avoided getting sick. One hundred plus years later, those who might have known exactly just how fate intervened are now long gone. Kornelis left many descendants including myself, curious enough to look at some vital statistics and do a little research to tease out more of a story in order to learn more about an ancestor from long ago. 

Photo courtesy Crystal Sponeybarger

The lights of our ancestors have not so much been dowsed, as gathered into the sun. -Rumi