​Happy 220th Birthday to my great-great-great-grandmother, Harmina Jans Boom!

Harmina was born in Beekbergen, Apeldoorn, Gelderland, Netherlands on 29 September 1799, to Jan Evarts Boom and Janna Harmens, and baptized in the Reformed church in Beekbergen on 6 October 1799. She was 5th of 11 children born, only 5 of which lived to adulthood. Her mother Janna died when Harmina was only 11 years old. Her father remarried, and his second wife had another 6 children.

At age 25, Harmina married Derk Jan van der Meij, who already had three children and had been widowed at age 29 when his first wife, Aaltjen Frederika Westerhuis, died in March of 1824. Harmina and Derk married 5 Feb 1825, and had the first of ten children together that November. Sadly, their first three children were either stillborn or died in infancy. Their other seven children lived to adulthood. Most of them never left Gelderland, but their youngest, Jan Willem van der Meij, born 25 Jan 1842, eventually immigrated to America.

At age 23, Jan Willem married Johanna Hendrika Groenouwe in 1865. They had two children in Gelderland and boarded a boat in 1871, eventually settling in Chicago, but wife Johanna appears to have died either on the journey or shortly after arrival. In Chicago, Jan Willem remarried in 1872 to Anna Jeltes Nederhood, who already had a son. They had a daughter in Illinois, and then moved to Missaukee county in northern Michigan, around 1873. There they had three more children.

Back in Gelderland, mother Harmina died on 13 Nov 1875, at age 76. After a couple decades in Missaukee, Anna died in 1895, leaving Jan widowed again, at age 53. He married a another widow that same year, Marrechien Martens Brinks, his third wife.

Jan Willem’s oldest, Dederika Willemina van der Meij, who was born back in Gelderland, married Roelof Geerts Brinks in Vogel Center, Missaukee, Michigan, on 04 Apr 1885. Their youngest (of six) was my grandfather, Herman Brinks.