The Popperian Zweyn

I recently became aware of a paper published in the Dutch language in Ons Voorgeslacht, #738, February 2021, entitled “Het Popperiaanse Zweyn over Jan, zoon van Willem Otten (died circa 1486) en de Arkel-afstamming.” The paper was written by Barend van Dooren, about whom I know nothing except that he seems to have had many genealogical articles published in the same magazine. “Het Popperiaanse Zweyn” can be found online at https://www.hogenda.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Ons_Voorgeslacht_738_februari_2021.pdf

As its title implies, the aritcle is about two different but related subjects. One is about the origin and spelling of the name of Thys Barentsen's great-grandfather's brother Jan Willems Zweyn/Zweym. The other subject is whether or not the Swaim line descends form the Arkel line. These are both subjects that I've written about extensively in this blog.

Jack Stuart Swaim's book on the genealogy of Swaim family is cited and discussed in the article, and the author praises Swaim for his well-researched genealogy but criticizes him for being to quick to believe that the Swaim line descends from the Arkel line. I'll hold off on analyzing this article in depth until I've re-read it at least once more, particulary as it takes time to work out the exact meaning of things that have been automatically translated by Google Translate. However, I will point out that it seems that the author believes that the true Swaim ancestry in Holland has been known for years, when in fact it was not known until I published my research into the matter in this blog on March 30, 2020. I don't expect anyone to have read this blog, but I do want proper credit for being the first one to connect the Swaim genealogy in America to the den Hartog/Deventer genealogy in Holland, which I was able to do by using Y-DNA evidence to focus my search. The link between the two may been discovered anyway at some point through genealogical evidence only, but the DNA evidence also proves beyond any real doubt the truth of the genealogical evidence. I was also the first the realize the importance of the archival document folio 41 (27-5-1661) that was published on Oscar den Uijl's website, which essentially proves that the Dutch Mathijs Barents is the same person as the New Netherlands Thys Barentsen.

Van Dooren challenges the probability that the father of Willem Ottensz (Deventer) (1440-1503) was Otto, the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel, the last of the Lords of Arkel. Although I personally think that Otto the bastard was in fact probably the father of Willem Ottensz (Deventer), I agree with van Dooren that there's not enough evidence yet to prove it.

I did recently come up with some interesting autosomal DNA evidence that tends to confirm that I'm related to the Arkel line through autosomal DNA, regardless of any Y-DNA connection. I'll publish a blog post on this soon. We don't know how long the Swaim line had lived in the Land of Arkel before it immigrated to America, but it could have been several centuries and if so, it wouldn't be surprising at all to learn that there was a genetic relationship between the two lines. The Land of Arkel is a relatively small area, and it is likely that more than one Swaim female had caught the eye of an Arkel male; this is even more likely, given the apparent propensity of the Arkels for producing illegitimate children. Also, there wouldn't necessarily have been any record of such a relationship, and in fact it is possible that many children born by Arkel men out of wedlock were never even known to have been Arkels, except perhaps by the mother (who, if she was married, would almost certainly have kept silent about it and passed off the child as her husband's).

This article at least has brought the existence of the Swaim line to the attention of the Dutch genealogical population, most of whom until it was pubished probably had no idea that the Swaim line was related to the den Hartog lines.