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.