Stories Bring our Family History To Life!

How many of you can remember hearing a story from your parents, your grandparents, or perhaps an aunt or an uncle?  Mine were always telling me about visits by friends and relatives or how Grandpa Matt Stodolski had built something.  I found out early in live that my Grandpa Matt was a man of many talents.

 My mother shared a story with me about my Great Grandma Lucy (Beaudry) Stodolski and how she was known for her fried chicken and lemon pie during the harvest season.  The farmers would travel from farm to farm harvesting and the women would provide the meals for the workers.

Stories like these are what give a family history life!  For those of us who like to build our family tree and are constantly looking for a date, a name, a location, or some other fact to fill a place in our tree, we often forget to also capture those stories we have heard or been told.  Obituaries are great for filling in those blanks, but many also show interests that a family member may have had and may offer us an opportunity to ask other family members more about that person.

I recently made a good connection with the Scharnatta family up in Canada.  They descend in our tree from Marie Stodolski, who married William Scharnatta.   As I have been interacting with our family members from the Great White North, I have noticed how they share little bits of information as they try to remember people from their past.  "Hey, do your remember so and so who used to live on the corner?" or "Do you remember that family we used to always visit?"  As we have those conversations, these are the stories we need to keep alive.  The smallest story now may be a really cool story later on.  They are also windows into our past.

So if you are asked to provide information for a family tree, remember to also share things you are not asked for...stories, exciting events in a family, or just fond memories of a family member.  If nothing else, write down the stories from your family so they are not forgotten.  We never want our family tree to die, and the stories about the lives of the family are what give it life.

Our Earliest Beginnings

The Dutchman who educated me on the meaning of the name "Hout" recently did a little more digging on our family.  He began with Anton (Antoon) Van Hout, the man we consider the patriarch of our family and who brought the Van Houts to America.  We always had a name for his father, Peter, or Petrus and his mother, Elisabeth.  It is at this point that our information was sketchy.

Come to find out, Peter spelled his last name "van Hout" instead of what we use..."Van Hout".  We also had Peter's father as Coenraad, though there was no documentation to back it up other than what people have in their assorted family trees.  No mention of a "Coenraad" was found in the Netherlands, but instead his name was Christiaan.  He married Johanna Bastiaans in 1813.

Following the naming conventions of the time, it is possible that Peter van Hout had more than the four children I originally had listed.  Another daughter was found, named Johanna, who should have been the oldest, being named after her grandmother.  However, there was no son listed with the name Christiaan, which is what Peter's first son should have been named.  Instead, it was Hendrikus.  So it is possible that Peter and Elisabeth had a son named Christiaan who died early.  The only way to confirm or deny that would be with church records.

Christiaan van Houdt (another name change) was the son of Justin Hout and Gertrude Smits.  They were married in 1786.

Justin Hout was one of four children (that I know of) from the 1751 marriage of Jan (Joannis) Joosten van den Hout and Jenneke Dirck Tonis.

So starting with our oldest ancestor, our name has seen itself go from "van den Hout" to "Hout" to "van Houdt" to "van Hout" to the final spelling of "Van Hout".   It is interesting to see how last names change over time, as well as first names.  Anton Van Hout is also found as Antoon, Antonius, and Anthoon.  A challenge, for sure, when trying to do family research and the name is so much different than what we are used to.