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2016-10-14 Johanna Kwik's Birth Record

There is no birth record for Johanna Kwik…

Johanna Kwik

This is a tale about a Leiden birth record. Let's start with the parents of the child. In 1851, Andries Kwik married Sara Catharina Berlemon in Leiden. They had a number of children, including one Johanna Kwik.
Well, maybe not, that is what this tale is about.

In 1908, Johannes de Jong married Johanna Kwik, again in Leiden.
The key facts on the marriage record are as follows.

There is nothing wrong with their marriage record, yet there is problem. The marriage record states that Johanna Kwik is a daugher of Andries Kwik & Sara Catharina Berlemon, born in Leiden, but a search for her birth record comes up empty.

possible reasons

A search for a birth record search may come up empty for various reasons.

• One possible reason is that the record has not been scanned and indexed yet, but Leiden has scanned and indexed all of them. Her birth record should be in there.
• Another possibility is that the birth happened somewhere else, but the Leiden marriage record says Leiden, and that's the one place least likely to be a mistake or misspelling in a Leiden record.
• Yet another possibility is that the age on the marriage record is wrong. This seems likely, considering the age difference, but further research into the family shows that the age difference is real.
• And then there is possibility is that the record is there, but not indexed correctly. This is a very real possibility in the case of Leiden records.

There should be a birth record for Johanna Kwik, but there isn't. That is a fact.

Leiden index

The current index for the Leiden records isn't the best possible one. Let's just say that, after working with it for many years, I've become convinced that the current index was not created through double entry. Still, there are ways to deal with indexing errors, such as searching by first name and year, last name and year, wildcard searches, the names of the father or mother instead of the child, and combinations of these techniques. I have tried, yet none of these techniques found a birth record for Johanna Kwik.

The reason every search for Johanna Kwik's birth failed is very simple: there is no birth for Johanna Kwik. There should be a birth record for Johanna Kwik, but there isn't. That is a fact.

---

The Jong-Kwik family

There is exactly one birth record for a Johanna Kwik in the Leiden Archives, and that is Johanna Kwik, born on 26 Apr 1847, as daughter of Paulus Kwik and Maria Mieremet. She married Jacobus van Berkel in 1874, and had ten children with him before she died in 1939. Clearly, this is not the Johanna Kwik I am looking for.

Some quick research into the Jong-Kwik family finds the death records for both spouses. The death records confirm that both ages on the marriage record are correct. There do not seem to be any children. That's pity, as birth records for children would not only provide additional confirmation of her age, but even allow to zero in on her exact here birth.

There is no reason to doubt that Johanna Kwik exists, but without a birth record, I still do not know her birth date:

death notices

The local newspaper, the Leidsche Dagblad (Leiden Daily) published death notices for both the husband and the wife, and neither one mentions children.
Jan de Jong died first, and his death notice lists Man, Broeder, behuwd-brother en Oom (Husband, Brother, Brother in Law and Uncle).
Johanna Kwik died later, and her death notice lists Zuster, Behuwdzuster en Tante (Sister, Sister in Law and Aunt).
The conventions for death notices and the wording of these two make it practically certain that they did not have any children.

Johanna Kwik's death notice does not list her birth date. Johanna Kwik's persoonskaart does list her birth date, but ordering a persoonskaart just to find a birth date is seems a bit indulgent, especially when you have not tried other resources where it may be found yet.

persoonskaart

The information listed above is more than sufficient to order Johanna Kwik's persoonskaart (person card) from the Central Bureau of Genealogy. A persoonskaart lists spouses, complete with birth date and place, but there is no persoonskaart for Jan de Jong, as he died before 1938, the year that system was introduced. A persoonskaart also lists all children, complete with birth date and place, so she would be on her parent's persoonskaart, but they do not have one, because they died decades before the introduction of this system.
Johanna Kwik's persoonskaart lists her own children, if any, but I am already pretty sure there are none, because of the death notices.

cost

Ordering persoonskaart (person card) from the Central Bureau of Genealogy (CBG) is not free. The current (October 2016) price for each persoonskaart or persoonslijst (person list) is € 4,20, and that charge is per request, not per result; if they don't find the persoonskaart or persoonslijst you are looking for, you still pay.
There's also a minimum cost of € 8,40 per order, so it's best to request at least two items per order. In fact, if you are eligible for the slight lower rate charged to CBG friends, it is best to request at least three items per order.
So, if I decided to order Johanna Kwik's persoonskaart, I should still delay the actual order until I have more items to order.

delay

An additional issue that creates further delay is that the CBG has become rather slow in fulfilling orders. A few years ago, orders were usually fulfilled within a week. This year, I ordered a few items, after not having ordered any for a few years. After a few weeks, I wondered what was taking so long, so I called to make sure that they had received my order and were processing it. When I called I was told not to worry, it had only been three weeks, and it usually takes a month.... and indeed, I received the ordered items almost exactly one month after I had ordered them.
This substantial turnaround time makes ordering a persoonskaart an unattractive option, one to take only after more readily available research possibilities have been exhausted.

---

marriage certificate

Sometimes, a marriage certificate lists the birth dates of the parties getting married. The marriage certificate for Johannes de Jong & Johanna Kwik follows the more common practice of stating their age at marriage.

Here's a styled transcription of the marriage record:

The transcription has been styled for readability and ease of comparison.

civil servant

The marriage record mentions two parties and four witnesses, a total of six persons, but there are seven signatures. The first signature on the marriage record (but the last one put down during the marriage ceremony) is that of the official who remains unmentioned; the civil servant overseeing the ceremony.
This is the signature of Wiebrant Pera (1851-1924), a resident of Leiden born in Niebert in the province of Groningen. An overview of his career in municipal governance can be found on the website of the Jan van Hout Society.

The marriage record states that Johanna Kwik produced her birth certificate. That birth certificate is based on her birth record, so there must be a birth record!

productions

To get married, both parties need to produce a number of documents. What they need to produce exactly depends on circumstances, such as their age and whether their parents are still alive, whether the man had completed his military service, and whether they had been married before, but it always includes a birth certificate.

The marriage record states that Johannes de Jong produced:

• zijn geboorte-acte (his birth certificate)
• de acte van ontbinding van zijn vorig huwelijk (the deed of dissolution of his previous marriage)

and that Johanna Kwik produced:

• hare geboorte-acte (her birth certificate)

The marriage record states that Johanna Kwik produced her birth certificate. That birth certificate is based on her birth record, so there must be a birth record!

That the marriage record states that she produced a birth certificate cannot be ignored. It is the reason to keep searching for the birth record.
If the clerck could find it in 1908, surely I can find it now? Well, although I may have the technological advantage of an searchable electronic index, instead of a paper index, the clerk had a more significant advantage: he had Johanna Kwik standing there, in front of him, telling him her birth date. That reduces the search for the birth record to a fairly straightforward lookup, no index needed.

marital attachments

The documents that the two parties wishing to get married have to produce are known as the huwelijkse bijlagen (marital attachments). These huwelijkse bijlagen were not thrown away after the marriage ceremony, but archived for future reference.
The huwelijkse bijlagen are not kept with the marriage records, but archived separately. They may contain interesting or hard to find information. Generally though, the vital and marriage records provide all the information needed, so Dutch genealogists do not consult the marital attachments often.
In this particular case, the marital attachments are of interest because they contain a birth certificate for Johanna Kwik.

That birth certificate lists her date and place of birth, and parents. This should confirm that she is a daughter of Andries Kwik & Sara Catharina Berlemon, born in Leiden, and provide her exact birth date. With the exact birth date, I should sure be able to find the birth record, and discover why I failed to find it before.

The marital attachments for Leiden marriages from 1843 onwards were destroyed by the large-scale bombardment on the Bezuidenhout on 3 Mar 1945.

availability

The marital attachments are just as public as the marriage records, and the rule for marriage records is 75 years of privacy. It is 2016, so marriage records and marital attachments from 1941 and earlier are public, and can be consulted by anyone. You just need to know where to find them.

The marital attachments for Leiden marriages until 1842 are in the National Archives in The Hague.
The marital attachments for Leiden marriages from 1843 onwards were destroyed by the large-scale bombardment on the Bezuidenhout on 3 Mar 1945. The goal of the bombardment were German V2 installations in the Haagse Bos (city forest), but the bombs were actually dropped on the Bezuidenhout, a residential area.
This was a huge tragedy, with 511 people killed, and 344 seriously injured. A total of 3300 houses, 290 shops, 10 public buildings, 9 schools and 5 churches were destroyed.

Most marriage records and marital attachments for the entire province of South Holland were lost in the bombardment. Marriage records were made in duplicate. The marriage records lost in the bombardment were lost were duplicates, the Leiden Archive has the originals.
Marital attachments do not have duplicates. The marital attachments lost in the bombardment on the Bezuidenhout are truly lost.

---

The Kwik-Berlemon family

Some quick research into the family of her parents, using the birth index to add all their children, yields the following overview:

This overview does not seem odd in any way. The oddest thing about this overview is the absence of Johanna Kwik.

second Johannes

It is only when you also add the death dates for all these children that you notice something odd:

The previous overview already showed that Andries Kwik and Sara Catharina Berlemon had two children named Johannes Kwik, but that isn't odd. Parents often reused a name if the previous child bearing that name had died. However, now that the death dates have been added, we see that the second child named Johannes Kwik was named while the first Johannes Kwik was still alive.
That is not impossible, some parents have given children the same name as a living sibling, but it is highly unlikely. If your genealogy has a situation like this, and the software you use has has implemented the Same Name Children Consistency Check, you'll get a warning.

It is natural to suspect that a mistake was made in creation of this overview. It seems likely that the first Johannes Kwik died young, and that the death of 3 Jun 1895 really belongs to the second Johannes Kwik.
However, that death record lists the age of the deceased as 73 - and that clearly matches the first Johannes Kwik.

The death record also list the deceased as widower of Elisabeth Pont and partner of Cornelia Maria Dassy, and when you look up the corresponding marriages, you'll again find that the age at marriage matches the first Johannes Kwik.

There seems to be no death record for the second Johannes Kwik. He could have died outside the Leiden region, the Leiden Archive may not have death record, but searches using WieWasWie and Open Archives, two national search engines that combine indexes from many archives, did not turn up anything either. No marriage record, no military service record, no registration at any address, no death record, nothing.

Johanna

Another oddity presents itself when you add Johanna Kwik to the overview. This is what my database looked like when I had discovered but not yet solved the problems:

This overview shows a remarkable combination of facts:

• Johannes Kwik has a birth record, but there seems to be nothing else about him.
• Johanna Kwik has no birth record, yet there is a marriage and a death record.

Moreover, that marriage record claims she provided a birth certificate, so there has to be a birth record...
So here is a crazy idea: perhaps Johannes Kwik and Johanna Kwik are the same person?
Perhaps Johannes is a transcription error for Johanna? That would not be unique…

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transcription errors

The Leiden index contains more than a fair share of transcription errors, and that includes at least one case where Johanna is indexed as Johannes; Johanna van der Lelie, born on 14 Mar 1870, has been indexed as Johannes van der Lelie.

Perhaps the same mistake was made when indexing the birth record for Johanna Kwik?
Alas, that is not the case. The name on the scan is quite readable and the name written there most definitely is Johannes, not Johanna...

Johannes and Johanna aren't twins either. There is no adjacent birth record for Johanna Kwik, there is only the birth record for Johanes Kwik.

death notices

A list of children in the death notices for Andries Kwik and Sara Catharina Berlemon might prove informative, but it seems the family did not publish death notices for them.

---

bevolkingsregister

The bevolkingsregister (population register) that Leiden kept before the introduction of the persoonskaart (person card) has not only been archived, it has also been scanned and indexed. This population register is not organised by individual or family, but by address. Do not be fooled by this superficial similarity to a census. This is a carefully maintained official register.
A search through the index for the Leiden bevolkingsregister find one Johanna Kwik - born on 24 Nov 1869! - living at the Barend van Namen's Hof 10.

Shown here is the result of a search on the Open Archives site, as this search result immediately lists everyone registered at the same address. Note that it lists both Jan de Jong, born in 1864 and Johanna Kwik, born on 24 Nov 1869. So this seems to be the right Johanna Kwik, but let's make sure.

Here is the relevant record of the bevolkingsregister on the site of Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken. Jan de Jong is fairly common name, but Jan de Jong and Johanna Kwik are grouped together, numbered 1 and 2, and moving into this residence together, on 14 Feb 1922.

The website offers a high-resolution download of the entire record, which is about 3 MB in size. This scaled-down illustration isn't very readabl,e but it does give a good idea what the entire record looks like. Below is the relevant section of the record.

No.	date	family name	given name	sex	function	birth date	birth place	marital status
1	14.2.22	Jong, de	Jan	M	17 Juni '64	hoofd	Bodegraven	H
2	,,	Kwik	Johanna	V	24 Nov '69	vrouw	Leiden	H

The population register lists Jan de Jong as the hoofd (head) of the family, and Johanna Kwik as the vrouw (wife). It also gives their birth dates and places:

• Jan de Jong, * 17 Jun 1864, Bodegraven
• Johanna Kwik, * 24 Nov 1869, Leiden

This is definitely the right couple. The names, their relationship, the birth dates, the birth places, everything matches.
I know Johanna's birth date now.

---

Johannes is Johanna

Johanna Kwik was born on 24 Nov 1869 in Leiden. Now that I have an exact date, I cannot possibly overlook her birth record - but I cannot find it either, because there is no birth record for Johanna Kwik, there only is the birth record for Johannes Kwik. Moreover there is only that birth record for Johannes Kwik, there seems to be no other record for him.
It sure seems that Johannes is Johanna; that, when Johanna Kwik was born, she was mistakenly registered as Johannes Kwik. That hypothesis explains all the mysteries - the lack of a birth record for Johanna Kwik, the apparent existence of a second Johannes Kwik within the same family, and the absence of any other record for that Johannes Kwik - in one fell swoop.

That hypothesis may explains everything, but it does not seem very likely. It is almost impossible for a mistake like that to get into the official record, and if it ever were to happen, the record would be corrected.
It is hard to believe that a record so wrong would be created and signed by all witnesses, without any of them, including the father, protesting that it is wrong. If it happened at all, the mistake would surely have been discovered when Johanna Kwik requested a birth a certificate for her marriage, and then the civil servant surely would have started a procedure to have the error corrected.
The idea that the mistake would happen in the first place is somewhat ludicrous already, the idea that it would be allowed to continue to exist uncorrected is preposterous - yet that is what happened.

I really would have liked to see the marital attachments. I wonder what name was listed on Johanna Kwik's birth certificate. Because the birth record says Johannes, the name on the birth certificate should be Johannes too.
Did the civil servant put down Johanna anyway, or add a letter explaining the situation? We will never know.
Johanna Kwik's birth certificate has been destroyed, but we still have the birth record for Johannes Kwik.

---

the birth record

The birth record of Johannes Kwik is easily found. This is the index entry on the site of Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, but you can also find it through WieWasWie or OpenArchieven.

You can click through to view the scan. Here, I zoomed in to highlight that the name on the record really is Johannes.

A single page contains two birth records. The birth record for Johannes Kwik is the lower half the page. The upper half is the birth record of Daniel Johannes de Haas, born on 23 Aug 1869.

The scan is a photo of a negative. I inverted it back to a positive for legibility. Here is a styled transcription of the record.

unusual

At first sight, this may seem a birth record like any other birth record, but it is not. This record has two features not seen in other records:

• the gender and the given name have been underlined
• there is a big question mark to the left of the record

This isn't a record for a girl named Johanna, nor a record for a boy named Johannes, this is a record for a girl named Johannes!

gender

Refer back to screenshot of the index entry for this birth record, and notice that the gender is missing. This is a significant shortcoming of the current Leiden index. Whoever made the index apparently thought that the gender need not be indexed, as the gender will be obvious from the name anyway, but it is not. The first name Anne may suggest a female, but in Friesland, it is a male name, and that is just the most famous example. The Leiden index should be upgraded to include gender.

On the birth record, the gender is filled in just above the name. In this particular case, it is easy to spot, because it has been underlined. It is not so easy to read, but there are only two expected values: manne to make the word mannelijk (male), and vrouw to make the word vrouwlijk (female).
When you see the name Johannes, you expect it to say manne, there is no reason why it should say anything else, and it vaguely resembles the shape of manne, so it does not bother you that it is hard to read. But look closely, and you'll notice that it does not say manne, it says vrouw!
This isn't a record for a girl named Johanna, nor a record for a boy named Johannes, this is a record for a girl named Johannes!

The web site search for Johanna Kwik's birth records did not fail because the record has been indexed incorrectly, but because Johannes Kwik's birth record has been indexed correctly.
In this peculiar case, an additional incorrect index of this record as Johanna Kwik and a remark on both index entries would be helpful.

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what happened

When Andries Kwik came to register his new-born daughter, the clerck wrote the right gender, but the wrong name. It remains surprising that this happened and that no one noticed. One images that everyone was in a merry mood, surely not a nitpicking one, and no expected a mistake like this. Perhaps everyone was in a bit of hurry to get on with it, so they could go celebrate with a pint of beer.
All three witnesses could write their own signature, but that does not imply they were very experienced readers, and if you squint a bit, that es at the end of the name looks just like an a anyway.

At some later date a clerck noticed the odd combination of a female gender with a male name, underlined both, and added a big question mark to highlight the issue.
This may have been the clerck that Johanna spoke with to get her birth certificate, but it need not be. We cannot tell, because the annotation has not been signed (unless the clerk's mark is below the 31 that was added later).

One imagines that when Johanna asked for a birth certificate, and the clerck looked up her birth record, some discussion ensued, but with her standing there, the entire family willing to state that she was born on that day, and, to top it off, the existence of an older brother named Johannes, the clerk reasoned that it is indeed her birth record, and apparently issued the requested birth certificate, later destroyed in the bombardment.

I can hazard a guess why the birth record wasn't corrected. As a matter of principle, no clerk has the authority to modify an existing registration, not even to correct an obvious mistake. A procedure must be followed, and an official decision made, before the correction can be made. The clerk probably did not look forward to starting that procedure and all the work it entails, while Johanna and her family did not feel like waiting for that procedure to complete, as it would almost certainly involve postponing the wedding.

The clerk may have told Johanna that her official name is Johannes, and the family probably had a good laugh about that. Johanna could have requested to have the birth certificate corrected, but the birth certificate was all that she came for, and when she received it, she was satisfied. She was preoccupied with the wedding, did not feel like starting some legal procedure, and certainly did not want to pay for it.
She would not need that record again, and everyone knew her as Johanna anyway.

Perhaps the city would have insisted on correcting her birth record if she had come in to register her first child, but it seems she never had children, and so never came in to register a child.
Her death record lists her name as Johanna, just as her marriage record does, without even a note that the birth record lists another name.

---

population notices

Municipalities used to publish population notices in the local newspapers, informing everyone of population changes, including who moved in, who moved out, births, deaths and marriages. Almost no one sees the actual records, but many people read these notices.

The population notice for 18-24 November of 1869 was published in the Leidsche Courant of 25 November 1869.
It mentions Johanna's birth: S. C. Kwik, geb. Berlemon. D..
It does not mention Johanna by name. All it says there is that Sara Catharina Kwik, born Berlemon, had a daughter.
Her parents are practically sure to have seen that notice, even if they did not subscribe to the newspaper. They may have bought the newspaper for the occasion, or someone else showed it to them. Even if they never saw it, they would certainly be congratulated by acquaintances, and they would have been very surprised if those acquaintances congratulated them on the birth of a daughter if they actually had a son.
If the population notice had been wrong, the parents would probably have gone back to the town hall to double-check the birth record and have it corrected.

---

Johanna or Johannes

The woman known as Johanna Kwik was actually born as Johannes Kwik. She married as Johanna and died as Johanna. Everyone knew her as Johanna, but the birth record was never corrected, so her actual name was and still is Johannes.

Which name do I enter in my database? Johannes or Johanna?
Both, of course. Only when I enter both names will I be able to find her under both names used in records.
I briefly considered using Johanna née Johannes as her display name, but that particular expression suggests a change of name, and her name was never changed; Johannes a.k.a. Johanna would be better.
Her official name is Johannes, but if the city clerks can squint and pretend to read Johanna, and allow her to be married as Johanna, so can I.

links

• Genealogy Symbols
• Jan van Hout: Leids Pluche: Wiebrand Pera
• Bombardement Bezuidenhout
• Same Name Children Consistency Check
• Nationaal Archief: Burgerlijke Stand Zuid-Holland vanaf 1811

 

Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.