Preliminary Results of an Investigation into the

Ancestry of Willem Ottens (~1440- )

and the Dutch den Hartog and American Swaim Lineages

 

                                                            Introduction

The progenitor of the Swaim line in America and den Hertog lines in the Netherlands and America was a man named Ot, about whom almost nothing is known except that he had two sons named Gherit and Willems. Given the years of birth of his sons, he must have been born within a few years of either side of 1400 AD and because his sons lived in the Land of Arkel in Holland it's assumed that he also lived there at the time his sons were born, although this doesn't necessarily imply that he was born there.

At this time mny family trees in both the Netherlands and the United States have identified Ot as Otto van Arkel, the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel, but that hypothesis is based on circumstantial evidence only, primarily on the coincidence of location and time as well as on the fact that Willem Ottens and his sons seem to have had more wealth and influence than most other farmers in the region. I've come to the conclusion that this circumstantial evidence isn't very convincing and that there's really no evidence that the Swaim line descends from the van Arkel. It may, of course, but as it stands now the genealogical evidence falls short of proof. Autosomal DNA analysis could possibly point strongly in one direction or another, but so many generations have passed from 1400 to the present day that most of Ot's descendants probably haven't inherited much if any his DNA so that it would take a coordinated effort to analyze the autosomal DNA of dozens of his descendants to come to any conclusions. The Y-DNA evidence is intriguing but will probably remain inconclusive unless and until a definitely known paternal line Arkel descendant tests his Y-DNA or until the remains of a deceased Arkel are tested.

This means that an honest family tree for the Swaim or den Hertog lines should terminate with Ot without fictionally claiming he's Otto van Arkel.

Deventer, Hartog and Swaim Surnames

Most of the information on these surnames comes from “GENEALOGIE VAN DE FAMILIE HERTOCH, HARTOCH, DEVENTER UIT DE VIJFHEERENLANDEN” by Ing. H. den Hertog, published 1986 in ‘Zuidhollandse Genealogieën.' However, based on Berend van Dooren's argument in his article “Het Popperiaanse Sweyn,” I use the name Zweym rather than Zweynen for Jan Zweym Willems. The information on the descendants of Jan Zweym comes primarily from the Ancestry.com crowd-source family tree and probably derives from Dutch genealogies which may or may not be well-researched.

Ot's oldest son was Gherit Ottens. Gherit had 12 children and none of them or their children appear to have used any name other than their patronamic name (e.g., his oldest son was Henrick Geritsen). In 1496 Gherit Ottens became a burgher of Gorincum, which den Hertog says was reserved only for the very weathy. Thus we see that Gherit and Willem's father Ot was likely to have been wealthy, whoever he was.

Willem was Ot's younger son, and he had 5 children:

Ot Willems

Adriaen Willems den Hartoch

Jan Zweym Willems

Jacop Willem Ottens

Claes Willem Ottens alias Wyntgen van Deventer

Ot Willems

Ot Willems lived in Utrecht and was a carpenter by trade, apparently also called “Ot the chestmaker.” Thus, he was a skilled craftsman rather than a farmer.

Adriaen Willems den Hartoch, AKA Adriaen Willems de Backer, AKA Adriaen Willems van Megen/Meghen

Based on one of his names, Adriaen Willems was presumably a baker by trade, which would have required a certain amount of captital to buy an oven and other equipment.

The surname van Megen probably indicates some connection to the County of Megen, which was a small independent sovereign located between Guelders and Brabant, just south of the Meuse and about 20 miles west of the city of Nijmegen. The County of Megen was founded in 1145 and city rights for the town of Megen was obtained in 1357. Megen is also located 5 miles northeast of the Brabant town of Oss, which is possibly the origin of the Knobbout van Os family of the Land of Arkel. The Knobbout family involved in the Arkel War on the side of Jan van Arkel, as in one source Knobbout Jansz and Klaas Knobbout were listed as “friends” of Jan van Arkel in May 1406, and in another source Knobbout Jansz (probably same as above) and Knobbout van Asse were mentioned as “allies” of Jan van Arkel in December 1406. “Van Asse” might be Oss, so it's possible this Knobbout was the father of the later Jan Knobbout van Os.

Adriaen Willems must have had a substantial connection with either the city or the county of Megen, but there seems to be no information regarding that connection. The very existence of the tiny County of Megen is odd and Berend van Dooren mentioned to be that it might be some clue as to the origin of the den Hartog family. On a website wappenwiki.org devoted to coats of arms, the House of Brimeu in France was said to be the Counts of Megen as well as the lords of Brimeu and Humbercourt in norther France. A geni.com family tree indicates that in 1145 (the suppsed founding of the County of Megen), Radulfus (or Raoul) de Brimeu was the then-living Brimeu who married Blanche de Ponthieu whose mother was from the powerful House of Burgundy, so perhaps Megen was created as a cheap way to give the Brimeu family a lofty title even though the County of Megen was very small. Megen also might be a useful Burgundian outpost in with which to keep an eye on Guelders, and possibly also a source of revenues if they extracted tolls from traffic on the Meuse/Maas. Also, one of Radulfus de Brimeu's 4^th great-grandfathers was supposedly Adelheid d'Arkel (940-967) who was supposedly a 13^th great-grandmother of Jan V van Arkel, although whether either the Arkels or the Briemeus were aware of that in the time of Jan V van Arkel is unknown.

But in the end all this is just speculation and Adriaen Willems' connection to Megen isn't known.

Ardriaen Willems had two children: Willem Adriaens and Adriaen Adriaens. Both of these children also used the surname van Megen. The oldest son Willem also went by the bizarre alias “De Hertoge of Quaettale van Utrecht.” In Latin quaet tales means such, so this alias must mean “The Duke or (some)such of Utrecht.” This name must be a joke, but it's full meaning is lost on me, at least, being rooting in the particulars of that place and time. Perhaps Willem had been using the surname Hartoch, and someone had jokingly asked him what duchy he was the duke of, and he'd jokingly replied “I'm the Duke or such of Utrecht.” Again, that's just a guess. Or maybe he was poking fun at his younger brother if he felt his younger brother had an inflated sense of self-worth for being a burgher of Utrecht (which Adriaen was). In any case, it means that he must have known Latin, which would mean that he was definitely educated to a higher level than But that's just a guess.

I followed Adriaen Willem's line down the Ancestry.com family tree to the present, so if this tree is correct there are probably many descendants living today, mostly in Ridderkerk and the surrounding areas, although one member surnamed Kole may have emigrated to Canada in the early 1900's and had several children there. Adriaen Willems' descendants appear never to have used the den Hartog name beyond Adriaen Willems.

Adriaen Willems' paternal line appears to have daughtered out, so none of his descendants will carry Swain/den Hartog Y-DNA. However, paternal lines not shown in this genealogy may very well still exist.

Some of the surnames of Adriaen's descendants include de Ruijter/Ruiter, Kole, Oossnanen, Moog, Bakker, Jongenotter, Boer, Vinck, van Noort, Huijser, Leeuwenburgh, Naaktgeboren, etc. (again, assuming the Ancestry family tree is correct).

Jan Zweym Willems

(1470-1542)

This is the first known use of the Sweym surname in the Swaim/den Hartog line. This name may be a true inherited surname, which “den Hartog” is probably not. The reason that this is likely is that the name was not very common the Netherlands at any time in the Netherlands but had in fact been used since at least the early 1300's in the Rotterdam-Westend-Den Haag region of Holland, and was also used in the 1400's in Gouda and in Utrecht. Naturally this surname is potentially a huge clue in determining the ultimate origin of the name itself, and of the origin of the Swaim/den Hartog line in Holland. The purpose of this post is to try to Ot and his descendants to one or more of these other Sweyms, and then from there to try to determine where the name and line may ultimately have come from.

Den Hertog says of Jan Zweym that he belonged to the “wealthy trading peasantry” and that his name appears more than a hundred times in the alderman's books of Gorinchem. Also that “a few deeds show that he has contacts with Antwerp. Does this point to ancestors who came from Flanders? The name Zweynen appears to be more common there.” (quotes are English translations from the Dutch).

Jan Zweym had 8 children, most of whom used the Zwenen/Zweym surname, at least three of whom appeared to have spelled it wih an “S” rather than a “Z.” The Dutch spelling of names at this time wasn't standardized, and as far as I can determine there was no particular meaning behind the various spelling of the name but was just based on the personal preference of the person who wrote it.

One Jan Zweym's children was Geertke Jansdr, also known as Geertruijdt Jansdr, born about 1495, died after 1560. Den Hartog says that her husband was Cornelis Cornelissen van der Giessen (de oude), also called Peert-cooper. Oscar den Uijl doesn't show the existence of this daughter at all (Genealogy: Jan Willems Zwijnen (den-uijl.nl), whereas this site Gezin van Geertruijdt Jansdr (guusbeltman.nl) (which I'll call Guusbeltman) not only shows her as a daughter of Jan Zweym, but also shows a second marriage to a Willem Herberen from Leerdam. The Guusbeltman site furthermore shows that Geertke had three children, one of these being Herberen Willemsz. Herberben Willemsz apparently had a daughter named Emmeken, whose full name was given as Emmeken Spronck Herbertsdr.

Another of Geerkte's children was Jan Willem Herbertsz (b. 1520 Leerdam), who had a son who also used a variation of the name Spronck: Herbert/Herberen Jansz Sprongh. Herbert Jansz Sprongh had 8 children, all of whom used the surname Sprong/Sprongh. One of these children, Maeijken Herberts Sprong (b. 1608 Leerdam) married Abraham Claes Deventer (1590 Leerdam), who was a son of Claes Willems, brother of Jan Sweym.

The progenitor of this Spronck/Sprong line is supposed to have been Willem Herberen Sprong, born 1440 in Leerbroek. This is according to the Ancestry.com tree and I don't know its source.

The reason I've spent time trying to clarify these relationships between the Swaim/den Hertog line and the Sprong line is that it's possible that they're actually branches of the same line from further in the past. As far as I can tell, the Sprong line seems to appear in the Land of Arkel at about the same time as the Swaim/den Hartog line, and there may be a reason for this. We'll return to this later.

There is obviously also the question of the validity of the family trees from which this information is taken. Den Hartog and den Uijl appear to be associated with genealogical organizations in Holland and so I assume their work is accurate and based on actual documentation. I don't know anything about Guusbeltman, but his work also appears well documented. Information taken from the Ancestry.com tree can be very useful because it draws from a wide range of contributors, some of whom may have information unavailable to others, but it carries a lot of speculative and wrong information as well. Also, online crowd-source trees in general are no doubt much more prone to what Berend van Dooren terms kwartierstaatvirus (pedigree virus), which I understand as the spread of incorrect genealogical relationships through mindless copying. The unproven relationship between Otto van Arkel and Willem Ottens is an example of this, as was the false parentage of Thys Barentsen.

I'm saying this because I don't want to be accused mysef of spreading pedigree virus when I report on relationships claimed by crowd-source trees or other online genealogies. Because I discovered the connection between the Swaim and den Hartog families in 2020 and because I reported on the Dutch genealogies that connected Willem Ottens to Otto van Arkel, I'm probably responsible for the American geenalogies that now show the Swaim paternal line being descended from the van Arkel line. However, I always made clear that there was some doubt as to whether or not that connection was valid and that it would need to be proved by Y-DNA comparison. I later spent considerable time comparing Dirck Pauw's history of the Arkel line to more distant Swaim Y-DNA matches, and in my opinion the correspondences are strong enough to allow the possibility that the Swaim line descended from the van Arkel line, but once again I'm pretty sure I never stated that this was proved.

Jacob Willem Ottens

Jacob had five daughters by two wives and no sons. He appears to have been a farmer and the one issue on which he stands out is the accusation that in 1518 he had killed Scalck Thoenissen by stabbing him to death. He appears not to have been punished for it, so apparently the question was legally answered in the negative.

Claes Willem Ottens

Claes is the most recent common ancestor of the Swaim and den Hartog paternal lines. The den Hartog line descends from Claes' son Willem, while the Swaim line descends from Claes' son Anthonis.

Willem Claes (de Jonge)

alias Willem Claes Deventer

alias Wyntgen van Deventer

Willem Claes is the first to use the name Deventer/van Deventer. Den Hertog suggests this might have been used in reference to a Wijnand Augustijnsen van Deventer who was involved in the early protests against Spanish persecution of Protestants. This could also refer to the Siege of Deventer in 1456, which was a struggle between Phillip III, Duke of Burgundy and the Utrecht Oversticht. Phillip III wanted to appoint his own candidate as Bishop of Utrecht, while the Utrecht church wanted to appoint Gijsbrecht van Brederode. Phillip III besieged Deventer with his army for five weeks, forcing utrecht to surrender to his wishes. Although this was well before Willem Claes was born, it might have had a modern resonance because the growing conflict with the Spanish over Protestantism involved the Burgundians (though of a different house than Phillip III's) and a Brederode—this time Hendrik van Brederode, who signed the “Compromise of Nobles” and would probably have known Wijnand Augustijnsen van Deventer. Hendrik van Brederode also was the great-grandson of Renoud II van Brederode who, as we will see, apparently employed a Jan Zweym—thus, there may have still been a connection between the two families we don't know about.

Alternatively, the name may have been an indirect reference to the Hook-and-Cod conflict, which was probably by this time mostly past, but which may have lingered on in importance in the family history. This reference would be to Deventer as a major center of imported cod from Norway, which was so important that the nickname for the citizens of Deventer even to this day is “Deventer Stokvis” (according to the Wikipedia article “Deventer”). Since cod as well as haddock was the major stockfish, the name Deventer may have been a coded means of showing support for the cod faction—a support which, as I will speculate, may have been the reason the Sweym line ended up in the Land of Arkel.

The den Hartog name appears to have been used only by the descendants of Willem Claes and not among the descendants of any other of Willem Claes' sons. This is true of the name Deventer, too. However, this is based only on what I know from the Ancestry.com tree, so it could be incorrect.

Anthonis Claessen

This is the progenitor of the Swaim line. There seems to be no evidence that this line ever used the name den Hartog, nor that it used the name Swaim until it was revived by Anthonis Claessen's great-grandson Mathijs (Thys) Barentsen in Holland, and then by his children in America.

The Sweym Surname as the Key to Unlocking the Family's History

Most of the descendants of Ot, the unknown progenitor of this entire clan in the Land of Arkel, simply used patronymic names rather than surnames. The exceptions are:

Adriaen Willems used the names den Hartog and van Megen, but only his son Willem appears to have used van Megen and, perhaps jokingly, den Hartog.

The descendants of Willem Claessen used the surname den Hartog which Willem Claessen must have borrowed from his uncle Adriaen, and he also used Deventer which he seems to have invented.

The sons of Jan Zweym used the name Zweym but the male line appears to have daughtered out at that generation and therefore was no longer used.

The descendants of Anthonis Claessen revived the Swaim surname three generations after Jan Zweym, Mathijs (Thys) Barentsen using it at least once in Holland and his children and their descendants using variations of it almost exclusively.

So we have this one family by the mid-1400's using the surnames van Megen, den Hartog/Hertog, van Deventer, and Zweym. Surname use is very fluid in this family at this time, and it'll take much more work to locate all the descendants mentioned in the various documents from this period (although it's possible the HoGenDa/Ons Voorgesacht organizations have already done much of this work). For instance, I came across a leenkamer entry for a 7 morgen property in Leerbroek, in the Molenweer, that references a van Megen:

1517 Jan van Megen Gerardsz is conveyed land from an apparently unrelated person

1542 Arnout van Megen inherits the land from on the death of his father Jan

So here are three van Megens (Gerard>Jan>Arnout) who we haven't come across yet. The name Gerard appears to be interchangeable with the name Gerrit, so it's possible that Gerard here is in fact Gherit Ottens, the son of Ot and brother of Willem Ottens. Gerrit Ottens did in fact have a son named Jan, born around 1462, so this is quite possible. If these are the same people, this means that the surname van Megen was used by descendants of both sons of Ot, which further means that it might be the true family surname (or one of the family surnames) used before the time of Ot and perhaps before the family settled in the Land of Arkel.

 My guess is that the Knobbout “van Os” derived from Oss in Brabant rather than Asse in Flanders, and that there was some familial connection between Adriaan Willems, son of Willem Ottens, and the Knobbout family and that the name “van Megen” came from this connection since Oss is very close to Megen. I'll discuss the Knobbout family in more detail later.  named Jan, born around 1462 (who would then be 55 years old in 1517), so this is quite possible. If these are the same people, this means that the surname van Megen was used by descendants of both sons of Ot, which further means that it might be the true family surname (or one of the family surnames) used before the time of Ot and perhaps before the family settled in the Land of Arkel.

Digression Regarding Van Buren

Jacob

This next brief section is probably unrelated to the search for the Swaim/den Hartog ancestors, but I'm including it here because it possibly involves the family of Thys Barentsen's second wife and because it involves the same 7 morgen property just mentioned. These entries follow the 1542 transaction of an Arnout van Megen inheriting the land from his father Jan:

1560 Cornelis Evertsz by conveyance from Arnout van Megen Jansz.

1567 Evert Cornelisz by the death of his father Cornelis Evertsz

1597 Bartholomeus van Buren Cornelisz. by conveyance from his brother Evert Cornelisz

1613 Cornelis Geardsz living in Middelkoop, by conveyance from Bartholomeus van Buren Cornelisz

These entries are of possibly of importance for the genealogy of the Swaim family in America. Thys Barentsen's second wife Scytie Cornelisdr is often given the surname of “van Buren,” although I've never seen any evidence proving that name. Since Scytie was apparently born in 1636, the Cornelis Evertsz who bought the land from Arnout van Megan can't be her father. The Cornelis Gerardsz who bought the land in 1613 from Bartholomeus van Buren is, however, the right age to be her father, and Cornelis is a name used within the family. The conveyance doesn't state that Cornelis Gerardsz was the brother of Bartholomeus van Buren, but that information might not be required if the property transfer was a monetary transaction rather than through inheritance, or the person who wrote the entry might not have known of that relationship (or it could be an unrelated man named Cornelis).

Syctie Cornelisdr's grandfather was supposed to have been named Maes/Mass rather than Gerard, but her great-grandfather was indeed supposed to have been named Bartholomeus, so it's credible that this is indeed her ancestors, but with some information garbled. About Bartholomeus there was the cryptic name “Bloemdendaal” parenthetically attached to it that that is of totally unknown provenance, but which I kept in case it was a clue of some sort. Bloemendaal is a town located very close to Haarlem in North Holland and is, according to the Wikipedia entry “Bloemendaal” “together with Wassenaar the wealthiest place in the Netherlands.” If this clue is based on actual documents, and if Bloemendaal at this early time was wealthy as it is now, then it also might indicate that Scytie Cornelis was in fact part of the noble van Buren family she is often placed in family trees. However, this remains unsubstantiated and would require much more research.

In any case, this probably is the family of Scytie Cornelis, or at least that of the van Buren family the migrated to the Rennselaerwyck colony in America, but it needs to be proven with further research.

Another question of interest is the identity of Arnout van Megen Jansz. This doesn't appear to be a grandson of Adriaen Willems de Backer/Hartoch/van Megen, son of Willem Ottens, because as far as we know Adriaen didn't have a son named Jan. So for now the identity of the Arnout van Megen is a mystery (to me, anyway).

Back to Sweym

It appears unknown at this time if the names den Hartog and Deventer were used previous to their use by the descendants of Willem Ottens. This needs further research, but for now we'll leave it alone.

The name Sweym (Zweym) was used by Jan Zweym Willems, the son of Willem Ottens, and by his children, although it appears that it was not passed down further than that due to “daughtering out.” If Jan Zweym was “entitled” to use that surname because it was either the paternal surname, then it must have been the surname of Ot, and all of his descendants were entitled to use it. Yet apparently none did, at least on record, until six generations after Ot when Thys Barentsen used it, and then Thys Barentsen's descendants after him.

It's clear that Thys Barentsen knew that his surname was Sweym, and that when the English conquered the New Netherland colony and insisted on the Dutch using true surnames rather than patronymic names, Thys Barentsen's family chose that name as their surname.

This would seem to indicate Sweym truly was the family surname rather than van Megen, which might be a maternal surname that two members chose to use—perhaps because they felt the Sweym surname was too “hot” politically?

Why was the Sweym surname suppressed by the family, except for Jan Zweym? My hypothesis is that it was suppressed because a Sweym from the region of Den Haag and Rotterdam had supported Jan V van Arkel in his war with Willem, the Count of Holland, who then confiscated that Sweym's property and banished him from Holland, and that the family moved to the Land of Arkel (or remained in it) possibly because they owned land there as well as had friends (such as Jan Knobbout) there. If my history is correct, at the conclusion of the Arkel War the Land of Arkel briefly became the property of the Duke of Guelders, who had been an ally of Arkel. Thus, perhaps any property Sweym owned there was not confiscated, and and the Sweyms could live there. However, the Land of Arkel was soon after returned to Holland, and perhaps to keep their property and avoid attracting any attention from the Counts of Holland they may have suppressed the use of the name Sweym.

Jan Zweym Willems, however, apparently lived in Utrecht, which wasn't controlled by the Counts of Holland, and perhaps therefore he wasn't concerned using the Sweym name. Furthermore, he may have had the protection of Arnoud Brederode, who had sided with Count Willem.

This hypothesis at this point is just an educated guess but is potentially supported by some evidence from the other Sweyms I'll discuss next, assuming evidence can be found to unequivocally connect the two branches of Sweyms.

Sweyms in Holland

My goal of this post is to find evidence, if any, connection the Sweyms of Holland to the Swaim/den Hartog line, an idea that I borrowed from Berend van Dooren's 2021 Ons Voorgeslacht article “Het Popperiaanse Sweyn.” Van Dooren mentioned in his article that Ronald van der Spiegel had in 2009 undertaken a study of a Sweym family living in Rijswijk, a town located in western Holland that today is essentially a part of the city of Den Haag. I don't have access to van der Spiegel's article, but I actually prefer this because then I can form my own opinion of this family without outside influence. Van der Spiegel is no doubt in many ways more qualified than I am to undertake such a study, but I have the probable advantage of being freer to speculate more broadly than he's probably willing to do because I have no reputation in the field to uphold. I also have the advantage of possibly being descended from the subjects of this study, and therefore possibly having DNA that I can compare to my DNA matches from Holland.

Y-chromosome DNA matching may someday definitely connect Swaim/den Hartog DNA to some of these early Dutch families, but until then there's autosomal (“normal”) DNA matching which is, however, not as definitive as Y-chromosome DNA because it's difficult or impossible to connect a particular segment of autosomal DNA to a particular ancestor. My general impression based on my Netherlands and Belgian DNA matches, however, is that it's quite possible that the Swaim/den Hartog line descends from these “Rijswijk” Sweyms. Until I began this project I didn't know what to make of many of my Dutch matches because they appeared to have little to no connection to the Land of Arkel, from which Thys Barentsen emigrated to America, and which was definitely the home region of the Swaim/den Hartog line at least from the early 1400's. On the other hand, several DNA matches are heavy on ancestors from the Rotterdam-Delft-Den Haag-Leiden area, with other ancestors having smaller nodes from Haarlem-Amsterdam, Zeeland, and Maastrict. The problem with these, however, is that it's difficult to connect these matches to any particular ancestor who emigrated from the Netherlands, since I have dozens of these (all of whom emigrated in the 1600's). One of these immigrants is a Couwenhoven, and I've encountered that name a few times in relation to the Rotterdam-Den Haag-Leiden area, so it's possible that many of these matches have “Couwenhoven” DNA rather than “Sweym” DNA.

Ironically, DNA matching from Americans with New Netherland ancestry probably provides a clearer picture of ancestry from, say, the 1300's and 1400's than would DNA matching from Netherlanders. This is because American New Netherland DNA is frozen in time in that for such Americans all Netherlands ancestry comes from before 1600's and before, unmixed by further Netherlands ancestry from the succeeding four centuries. For example, very little of my DNA is from the Netherlands, so what little I have must be from the limited number of ancestors I have who immigrated to New Netherland; on the contrary, the overwhelming majority of the Netherlands ancestry from Netherlanders is from the last several generations, and it would be very difficult to know if any particular segment of DNA came from a recent ancestor or a more distant ancestor. All of my Netherlands DNA comes from at least 12 generations back (as far as I know).

Leenkamers were private records used by Dutch nobles to keep track of the land they loaned to their lower-ranking nobles under the medieval fief system. These loans were inheritable by certain family members defined either by custom or in the loan document, and could also be sold to non-family members, although certain formalities had to be adhered to. When a person inherited such land, that transaction was usually recorded as being taken “met ledige hand” (with empty hand).

A leenman could lose his land if he committed an act of egregious disloyalty to his lord, in which case the lord would nullify the loan, reclaim the land, and usually hand it over to a more loyal subject. This was apparently rare, but it occurred to a number of lords in the 1350's due to the Hook and Cod disputes and occurred again fifty years later to Jan V van Arkel as a result of the “Arkel War.” This is important to understand, because this may have happened to a Sweym at one or the other of these times and may in fact be how the Sweyms came to be living in the Land of Arkel.

When land was passed down through inheritance, that transaction was usually recorded as being taken “met ledige hand” (with empty hand), presumably meaning that the person who received the land did so without paying for it with cash. HoGenDa has an explanation (in Dutch) of using “leenkamers” for genealogy at Leenkamers » HoGenDa

I don't know anything about the HoGenDa (Hollandse Genealogische Databank) organization, but apparenty various members have spent years transcribing various leenkamer records from the original handwritten documents, and the organization has generously posted them online for everyone to examine (Leenkamers » HoGenDa ). These are very useful records because they're basically chain-of-title documents that often elucidate familial relationships, associate a person with a particular property or area, and sometimes provide or imply other information such as when a particular was dispossessed of his loan for defying his overlord. Many of the people in the earlier records are various nobles because they had the money to buy property, and even in the later records I suspect that most of those buying and selling property must have been better off financially than the average person. I don't know the statistics, but I doubt that the vast majority of people in Holland even in the early modern period owned any land.

The leenkamer records are also useful because they often go back to the 1300's or even before. The HoGenDa transcriptions are useful above and beyond the transcribed data because often there's an introduction that explains something about the leenkamer records that's not contained within the records themselves.

Sweyms show up in a number of leenkamer documents from the 1300's and 1400's, but apparently not thereafter as far as my limited research was able to determine. The name also shows here and there in other records.

When and where the name appears in the records is itself a possible clue to the identity of Swaim line. The name seems to appear suddenly in the records in the early 1300's in the Den Haag-Rotterdam area, although this might just be because records from earlier than that are fragmentary. Property records from other parts of Holland don't appear as easy to obtain online as those from Holland, which would limit the ability to reconstruct relationships if the Swaim line originally came from the Limburg area and possibly Brabant to the west of Limburg, or from Flanders.

Also, it's an assumption that the Swaim/den Hartong line from the Land of Arkel is from the same family by that name in the Den Haag-Rotterdam area, and in other places it's found such as North Holland, Gouda and Utrecht. They probably are because the name wasn't common, although of course if the name was based on a geographical location (as it probably is) it's possible that two or more unrelated families adopted the same surname. Even if the name derives from the town of Swalmen, it's possible that the Land of Arkel Swaims were anonymous peasants who worked their way up the Maas to the Land of Arkel, possibly to escape oppression and mismanagement by their lords in Swalmen, the Den Haag-Rotterdam Sweyms! That doesn't seem likely because Land of Arkel Swaims/den Hartogs appear in the records owning a fair amount of real estate, so they must have been prosperous. It's more likely the Swaims in the Land of Arkel were a branch of the Den Haag-Rotterdam Sweyms who for some reason lot their land and social status and moved to the Land of Arkel to live the best they could with what they had left. If this is true, many individual members of the line may have grown progressively poorer with each generation as their inherited land (now freed from the feudal loan system, apparently) was divided among multiple sons and daughters. Something like this is probably what prompted Thys Barentsen and others to emigrate to America, where land was cheaper and easier to obtain, though at the cost of a dangerous trip across the Atlantic Ocean (from the Spanish as well as the weather), the risk of war with the Indians, and the separation from family and friends in the Netherlands.

In the records, the Sweym name also appears to have died out in the by the 1500's. This could partly be explained if the line “daughtered-out” by leaving only females who had children, a process that is quite common. However, if the Swaim line comes from the Sweym line, then it's clear that the line didn't daughter out everywhere, though it apparently remained “underground” by not being used in the records. This would have been quite easy to do since surnames weren't used very often anyway, and since one's official name was probably his or her patroynmic name. Perhaps the use of true surnames by the peasantry was seen as pretentious and was socially discouraged, although this is just a guess.

The following is a long section of summaries of the leenkamers I found with references to Sweyms (Sweym, Sweymen, Zweym, ...). None of these are primary documents but are transcripts of primary documents, all of which are in handwriting, the meaning of which at times is no doubt subject to some interpretation. Even if I had access to the primary documents I don't have the background to interpret any ambiguities or decode th handwriting, which is sometimes difficult even for experts in Holland. Rather than providing the documents in the original Dutch, I'll give my English translation of them, but since I don't read or speak Dutch there will be errors and ambiguities in meaning. The leenkamers present a kind of chain-of-title for a particular property but are often incomplete and there are often missing links in the chain.

0502 Inventaris van de Archieven van de kerken van Leiden

This is an entry from a Google search summary:

Unfortunately, I haven't yet found this actual entry on the erfgoedleiden.nl web page, but the  Google Translate translation of this is “Lord Dirc van Wassenaer, knight, viscount of Leyden, gives to Ghisebrecht Sweymen the southern end of Monster for aldermen of Monster.” The property in this transaction appears to be meant for the use of the city of Leiden rather than being a transaction to benefit Ghisebrecht Sweymen, but clearly indicates that Dirk van Wassenaer knew and trusted Ghisebrecht Sweymen. Thus, we know from the beginning that at least Sweym is a man of some standing in Leiden.

We don't have a date for this transaction, but this “Dirc van Wassenaer” is either Dirk II van Wassenaer (c. 1230-1310) or his grandson Dirk III van Wassenaer (1325-1391). If it's Dirk II van Wassenaer, then this Ghisebrecht Sweymen would be the elder Ghisebrecht Sweym/Zweym that we're about to meet from the leenkamer entries; if it's Dirk III van Wassenaer, then this Ghisebrecht Sweym would likely be the grandson of the elder Ghisebreacht Sweym (with Gheret/Gerard Sweym as the son of one and the father of the other).

The Wassenaer family was an uradel noble family and “one of the few original noble families from Holland that has survived to this day,” according to the Wikipedia entry “Van Wassenaer.” One explanation for the name is that it came from the crescent moons on the family coat of arms, copied from a banner captured during a crusade (the crescent moon being a common Muslim motif, and the Dutch word for crescent moon being wassende maan). Another explanation is that the name means Wasser Heeren, or Sea Lords, “which had been a traditional title that the invading Romans (under Caligula) had recognized while destituting the kings of Batavia.” (Wikipedia) The home of the Wassenaers was the city of Wassenaer located south of Leiden and north of Den Haag (which are only 12 miles apart).

The Wassenaer family has various offshoot branches including van Cranenburch, van Groenevelt, Duvenvoorde/Duivenvoorde, and Polanen, which branched from Duvenvoorde.

Dirk I van Wassenaer was married to Bertha van Teijlingen (Teylingen), and the van Brederodes branched from the Teylingens.

"de Werve" House in Rijswijk 

<1281 Dirk van de Werve mentioned.

1309: Gijsbert Sweym upon transfer by Amelis uten Weerde, who purchased, from Floris van de Werve

1324 Life estate to Clementia, daughter of Herbaren van Foreest, married to Gijsbert Sweym, confirmed by his oldest son Gerard

-1390: Spronc van de Werve te Rijswijk met ledige hand

1429 Jan van de Werve by death of his father Spronc

1430 Life estate to Nikolaas van de Werve, brother of Jan van de Werve, on payment of 20 pond hollands, 6 gouden willemsschilden and 10 pond also on de Tempel and a tenth (of real estate) in Monster.

1434 Herbaren van de Werve by the death of his brother Jan.

1477: Herbaren van de Werve (out-of-sequence date not explained; possibly should be 1437 or 1447) )

1448 Jan Ruigrok, raad (court officer?), by transfer from Herbaren van de Werve (van de Werve by reference to 1451 record) – purchase

1451 Janna, daughter of Kerstant van den Berge, married to Herbaren van de Werve, transfer confirmed by Jan Ruigrok van de Werve.

1454 Jan Ruigrok. raad, who built the house at his own expense, dedicates 146 morgen of his own and is confirmed in two pairs of breeding swans, to be moved from Wassenaar.

1462 Jan Ruigrok van de Werve allowed his children to loan 60 morgen of land

1470 Nikolaas Ruigrok van de Werve by transfer from his his father Jan, which he leases the house and the 160 morgen with the great spirit tithe (“geesttiend”)

The first record for this property shows that it was owned by a Dirk van de Werve sometime before 1281.

The 1309 transaction appears to be a sale by Floris van de Werve to Gijsbrecht Sweym, but the role of Amelis uten Weerde in this transaction is unclear to me. Probably Amelis uten Weerde was acting as an agent in the transaction, and most likely he was a relative of Gijsbert Sweym (which is something we'll look into later). Regardless of Amelis uten Weerde's role in the transfer, Gijsbert Sweym ends up with the house and property. We don't know how Floris van de Werve ended up with the property, but we can assume that he'd probably inherited it from Dirk van de Werve who may have been his father.

Five years after he purchased the house, Gijsbert Sweym gave a lijftocht to his wife Clementia van Foreest, daughter of Herbaren van Foreest. This gift was confirmed by Gijsbert's oldest son Gerard, which means that he was intended to inherit the house that would now be burdened with this new property interest, so the granting of that new property interest probably required his approval; or at least by approving it he couldn't later complain about it.

(A note on names: The Dutch form of the name for Gerard is Gerrit/Gherit, and both names are used for this same person in various leenkamers. Gijsbert is also written as Ghijsbrecht or Gysbrecht. Herbaren and Harper and Herbert also appear to refer to the same person. Sweym, Zweym and Zueme are all used inerchangeably for these Rijswijk Sweyms). When paraphrasing a translation for a leenkamer I'll spell the name as it was written on the transcription, but otherwise, for convenience, I'll usually use Gijsbert, Gerard, Herbaren, and Sweym.)

Lijftochts were commonly given to family members who didn't own the property and appear to be essentially the same thing as the English/American life estate, which gives the right for a person to occupy a property (and/or take the profits of the property) for that person's life, without giving an ownership interest in the property. This was probably a common agreement at marriage, to provide the security of a place for the wife to live as long as she was alive; even if the land was sold to another person during the wife's lifetime, she would still retain the right to live there.

An unresolved issue here is the relationship between Gijsbert's son Gerard and Gijsbert's wife Clementia van Foreest. Was Clementia his mother or was she Gijsbert's second wife and Gerard's mother is unknown to us? If Clementia was Gerard's mother, then the marriage of Gijsbert and Clementia would have had to have taken place well before 1309, and in that case why had it taken Gijsbert five years to provide Clementia the security of a life estate on the house? So it's possible that Gerard's mother was someone other than Clementia. This matters because if Clementia was not Gerard's mother, then his descendants would not have van Foreest ancestry. The van Foreest family was originally from the area around Aachen in today's Germany, but had moved to Holland; the van Foreest ambacht (essentially, administrative area) was Foreest just north of Gouda, and probably included the nearby Tempel (the Sweyms also owned a house in Vlaardingen called “de Tempel”).

There's a gap of 66 years between the 1324 entry and the next entry, in which Spronc van de Werve takes the house and property “met ledige hand.” Met ledige hand is a term of art in the feudal property “loan” system which (as I understand it) usually means that the land is transferred as a natural consequence of the terms of the loan to a family member, rather than as a sale to a non-family member; in other words, it's inherited.

During the 66-year gap from the 1324 entry to the 1390 entry, ownership of the house had probably changed hands at least once, from Gijsbert to his son Gerard, but the records is silent on this. The real question is how did a van de Werve end up inheriting the estate from a Sweym?

As I understand it, there are two possible ways this might have happened. The first and most likely way is that Spronc van de Werve was the son of either Gerrit Sweym or possibly his son Gijsbert. The older Gijsbert Sweym had a son Harper as well as Gijsbert and may very well have had a son named Spronc van de Werve as well (who chose to use the “van de Werve” name rather than the “Sweym” name). But this needs clarification.

To me it looks as if the Sweyms were in fact part of the van de Werve family, although if this is true the exact connection appears to be unknown. The most likely explanation would be that the older Gijsbert's father had married a van de Werve, and that this is why Floris van de Werve had sold Gijsbert this “de Werve” house (through the agency of Amelis uten Weerde).

But there is another possibility to explain how Spronc van de Werve took the house “met ledige hand.” This is that if the house had been forfeited back to the Count of Holland (from which it was loaned) because of an act of disloyalty by the holder of the loan. Based on information from other leenkamers, that disloyal subject might have been Gerard Sweym, if he had been involved in the Hook and Cod dispute, perhaps the Delft uprising, which resulted in several nobles losing their properties and privileges to the count, who then gave those properties to loyal subjects. If this had happened to Gerard, then in 1390 the house and property may have been given by the count to Spronc van de Werve “met ledige hand.” In this case, it isn't necessary that the Sweyms were actually van de Werves for this transaction to have occurred; the property essentially reverted back to the ownership of the van de Werves and was lost to the Sweyms. This is speculation only but is based on hints from other leenkamer entries. It would also explain why the Sweym name died out in this line, if it was more politic to revert back to the van de Werve name than retain the Sweym name.

t's also possible that both of the above scenarios is true. The Sweyms may have been related to the van de Werves and Gerrit may have had his lands forfeited.

If a Sweym had married a van de Werve and Spronc van de Werve, who obtained possession of “de Werve” in 1390 was the son of either Gerrit Sweym or the younger Gijsbert Sweym. In any case, Spronc died in 1429 and the house passed to his son Jan van de Werve. In 1434 Jan died and the house passed to Herbaren, the brother of Jan and son of Spronc. Jan and Herbaren aslo have a brother Nikolaas, who'd been given a life estate in the house in 1430.

In 1451 the house appears to go to Herbaren's wife Jana van den Berge with the approval of Jan Ruigrok van den Werve. The identity of Jan Ruigrok van den Werve is unclear, although it's probably a son of Herbaren van de Werve and Janna van den Berge.

I've left out several later entries because they shouldn't be relevant to the primary purpose of this post, which is to try to identify the ancestors of Willem Ottens, who was born in about 1440; obviously anyone born after about 1420 couldn't be an ancestor.

Batavia Illustrata

On pages 1163-1167 of Batavia Illustrata (Batavia illustrata, ofte Verhandelinge vanden oorspronk, voortgank, zeden, eere, staat en godtsdienst van oud Batavien, mitsgaders van den adel en regeringe van Hollandt (googleusercontent.com) ) is an entry for Werve about the the van de Werve family of Antwerp, Flanders, and Oudengiessenkerk, Holland (about six miles west of Gorinchem).

On pages 1292-1293 is an entry for 't Huys te Werve, about the van de Werve family from Rijswijk. I'm uncertain about the connection between these two families of van de Werve. It's likely that there is a connection, that they're branches of the same tree, but I haven't seen anything to clarify the relationship. It seems unlikely that there'd be two unrelated noble famies of the same name, however.

I'll include here parts of the 't Huys te Werve, which obviously (as it states) relies heavily or exclusively on the leenkamer entries. First, here's a reproduction of the part of this section that mentions Gijsbert Sweym and Amelis uten Weerde:

Here's a translation of parts of this section:

Located in the Ambacht van Rijswijk, is a knightly castle and home of the old Heeren van de Werve, who through the male line came from the Heeren van Weena, formerly probes[?] of the City of Rotterdam, from a second son of Viscounts of Leyden, having conducted about the year 1010, as again forming a new family line for them, in the place of the gold fascia and azure of the Viscounts of Leyden, to their coat of arms a silver fascia on green; as the van Boekel family has, the van Boekels also being also of that origin, though have also changed their coat of arms, with an Azure fascia...From the family of Weena and van de Werve, Rotterdam, before it was still a city, adopted its coat of arms....

We have found in the Leenkamer of Holland as in other Archives...that the owners of this house "te Werve," Floris vande Werve, having read in the year 1262 item Willem and Beatrix vande Werve, his children; thereafter Amelis Uyttenwaarde anno 1309 and Gijsbregt Swijnen, having had as wife Clemense van Foreest, Herbert's daughter; then Huybert vande Werve, anno 1327 and Jan van de Werve, anno 1328 who also owned the Huis te Werve tot Voorburg....

The most important aspect of this entry is that it implies that both Gijsbert Sweym and Amelis uten Weerde were part of the van de Werve family.

Another interesting aspect is that it says that the van de Werve line descended from the Lords of Weena and ultimately (from the year 1010) from the Viscounts of Leiden. The Wassenaer family were the viscounts of Leiden at a later time, but I haven't found any information whether or not they were the viscounts of Leiden as this earlier time.

This entry also states that the Bokel (Boekel, Buekel) family also came from “that origin,” apparently meaning from the lords of Weena as well as from the Viscounts of Leiden. The Wikipedia.nl entry on “Hof van Wena” says (in translation) “The oldest known owner of the Hof van Wena was the Bokel family. The Bokel van Wena family also owned several estates around Rotterdam, including Oost- en West-Blommersdijk and Beukelsdijk.”

The Bokel family also owned Bulgersteyn Castle, in which a “Jan Sweyn Dircxsz” lived in 1390, a connection that we'll be looking at later. So we'll keep in mind this claim from Batavia Illustrata that the Bokel family was related to the van de Werve family.

December 25 2022 Note: I now believe that the surname Bokel and the people who carried it may well have come from Boukoul located 1.5 miles south of Swalmen in Limburg. This Boukoul is, furthermore, located 9 miles northeast of Weerd (southwest of Roermond). This neatly explains the conjuction of the names Swaim, Bokel, and uten Weerde in Rijswijk can Rotterdam in Holland. 

Amelis uten Weerde

In the transaction that transferred the property in 1309 from the van de Werve family to Gijsbert Sweym, Amelis uten Weerde is named as some kind of facilitator or guarantor of the transaction. This almost certainly means that he's a family member of Gijsbert Sweym, although he could instead have been a close friend.

Once again, the author of Batavia Illustrata stated that both Gijsbert Sweym and Amelis uten Weerde were members of the van de Werve family, so that's a strong possibility.

Most Dutch today probably know of Amelis uten Weerde because his estate, located about 3 miles east of the center of Utrecht, is a museum and recreation area. The Dutch Wikipedia article “Amelisweerd” states that Amelisweerd was “indirectly mentioned for the first time in 1224 with the mention of the knight Amelis miles de Insula which is the Latin variant of Amelis uit de Weerde.” This statement that Amelis miles de Insula is the “Latin variant” of Amelis uit de Weerde is simply wrong: the Latin name means “Amelis, knight from the Island,” whereas the Dutch Amelis uit de Weerde means “Amelis out of the Weerde (Weerde likely being a specific place but not necessarily an island, the word for which is eiland). The Wikipedia article also states that “This Amelis probably had an innkeeper along the Kromme Rijn on loan from the Deanery of Oudmunster in Utrecht and the name derived from this.” This explanation is referring to the fact that one Dutch word for inkeeper is waard. However, again, this fails to address the plain meaning of Amelis' Latin name. From the Latin name we can assume that Amelis was likely to have come from an island, and from the Dutch name we can assume that either the island was named Weerde or that a location on the island was named that.

But was the name Weerde, Waarde, or Waerde? Various spellings of Amelis' name are given in Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad by van Oyen and van Maanen (1901): Wtenweerde, Utenwaerde, Utenweerde, Utenwerde, Uterweert, van Weerde, Amilius de Werdhe, van de Weerd, Uut den Weerde, Wtten Wairde. Thus, if the various Dutch writers who spelled his ame can't agree on how it was spelled (or probably how it was pronounced), we're left only with uncertainly. The name could be closer to the modern Weerde or to the modern Waard (and I'm not even certain how much difference there is in the pronunciation between the two).

I've come up with three possibilities for an island having or containing the name Weerd, Weerde, Weert, Waard, or Waarde:

1. The island of Hoeksche Waard, which is the large island located just south of Rotterdam on which are located the towns Strijen, Maasdijk, Westmaas, Oud-Beijerland, Puttershoek, and Maasdam, among others (the ones I named are ones that I remember coming across in this research). However, I don't know whether this island was an island in the 1200's or 1300's, or whether it was called Waard at that time.

2. The town of Weerd just south of Roermond in Netherlands Limburg, located on the banks of the Maas. The Weerd south of Roermond is not located on an island today but given its riverside location on the looping Maas riverit could easily have been located in the past on a river island. Even today it is almost an island, located with a loop of the Maas and almost made an island by the Vlootbeek to the south. Also, there's a place in Roermond itself called “de Weerd” which is a hamlet and nature/recreation area that was in the news in 2011 because high water levels had turned it into an island (i.e., insula); perhaps 700-800 years ago it more or less permanently an island. My reason for including these Limburg Weerds is because the town of Swalmen is located about 10 miles to the north, and as I mentioned in a previous post this town in the local Limburgish dialect is pronounced essentially like Sweym or Swaim; older maps spell the town Swamme, Suamme, Zuamme, Zwamme. One of may New Netherland ancestors was also surnamed “van de Swalme” and her grandfather and probably father immigrated on the same ship with Thys Barentsen.

3. The town of Waarde on the Zeeland Island of Walcheren, which, however, was at Amelis uten Weerde's time on the island of Zuid-Beveren (as we will see, a Sweym appears to have been associated with the Visscher/Vischer/Visser family of Rotterdam that appears to have originally been from Zeeland; in the 1300's the family apparently still owned land on the island of Schouwen, just to the north of Walcheren-Beveren). This Waarde is also located close to Flanders, and this Sweym who was associated with the Vissers may have used the name Jan Vlaminc as well as Jan Sweyn. Furthermore, in east Flanders there a town and river called Zwalm that could be the origin of the name Sweym, although I don't know if this Flemish Zwalm is pronounced similarly to the Limburg Swalmen.

Uten Weerd Coat of Arms

Something that I haven't seen mentioned in relation to Amelis uten Weerde's origins in his coat of arms which, if accurately protrayed in the source from which I took it, provides a strong clue as to his origin. My source for this coat of arms is Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad by van Oyen and van Maanen (1901). Here's the portrayal in this book:

Now here are the coats of arms of the Wassenaer family and of the Polanen family, which is an offshoot of the Wassenaer family:

Wassenaer

Polanen

                                                                               

It's quite clear from these coats of arms that Amelis uten Weerde was a Waasenaer, possibly a Polanen, although at the early date that Amelis uten Weerde lived this heraldry might not have been as standardized as later. Regardless, it's highly unlikely that anyone would have been allowed to use the Wassenaer triple-crescent moon motif on their coat of arms unless they were closely related to the family.

I've already mentioned the Wassenaer family in relation to the property transfer in Leiden to Ghisebrecht Sweym, so now we have another connection between the two families. Wassenaer was the origin of the Bokel family as well.

Although it seems unlikely that Amelis uten Weerde would have come from Limburg if he was a Wassenaer, it's possible that he was a Wassenaer on his mother's side but a Sweym on his father's side, so in my opinion a Limburg origin for the Sweym line is still viable.

Amelisswagher or Amelis Weerde?

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN TE BLEISWIJK, HILLEGERSBERG, KRALINGEN, OVERSCHIE, ROTTERDAM, SCHIEBROEK, SCHOONDERLOO EN ZEVENHUIZEN, 1200-1648 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 41 (1986), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

There's another possible mention of Amelis uten Weerd in the abovepreferenced leenkamer for a property in Schiebroek that C. Hoek of Ons Voorgeslacht transcribed from the handwriting as “Dirric de Visker Amelis swagher, mentioned in 1316.” This entry was transcribed earlier by Dr. H.C.H. Moquette (who worked for more than 30 years in the Rotterdam Municipal Archives) as Dirric de Visker”Amelisswagher”, the difference probably being due to interpretation of the handwriting. If the name was actually meant to be Ameliss Wagher, then this may be the same person as Amelis uten Weerd (various spellings of the name given in Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad by van Oyen and van Maanen (1901) are Wtenweerde, Utenwaerde, Utenweerde, Utenwerde, Uterwwert, van Weerde, Amilius de Werdhe, van de Weerd, Uut den Weerde, Wtten Wairde, Utenwaerde, as well as ex Insula and de Insula. Clearly various writers transcribed the name in various ways, and wagher could be one variant. The year 1316 for this leenkamer entry is only 7 years after the 1309 entry for Amelis uten Weerd in relation to Gijsbert Sweym, so the chronology is correct as well.

Moquette says in a footnote that this Amelisswagher "must have been Amelis or Melis van Berkel," but that ignores what the writer plainly wrote, as it seems unlikely that Ameliswagher is a credible transcription of the sound Amelis van Berkel. My interpretation of the older document is that whoever wrote it meant that “Amelisswagher” was an alias for “Dirric de Visscher,” not that Amelisswagher was a separate person named van Berkel, if that's what Moquette means. In other words, that Dirk de Visker is Amelis Weerde.

(The Berkel family, may have been related to Amelis uten Weerde after all. on page 1001 of Batavia Illustrata, under the heading Matenes, it is said that Burggrave of Leiden spawned not only “Bleyswijk and Wena” (which it said elsewhere in turn spawned van de Werve and Bokel), but also the Berkel family. So perhaps Amelis uten Weerde was a Berkel after all. We'll soon see that the Bokels were also the Matheness/Mateness family, so already we can see that there's a connection between the Wassenaer family, the Burggraves of Leiden, the Lords of Weena, the Bokels, the Matheness family, the van de Werves, Amelis uten Weerde, the Berkels, and the Sweyms. And, as the leenkamer entries will show, some of these did interact with each other to help each other (and no doubt also to protect their own interests.)

(The Amelisswagher was in 1316 enfiefed with land in “heer Engebrechtsland” located between “Schie en Gouda;” this may refer to Engelbrecht van Wassenaer van Cranenburgh, whose “land” may have been Bleijswijk, which is between Schiedam and Gouda). According to the Geni.com family tree, the paternal grandmother of Engebrecht was Bertha van Teylingen (1197-1240) and the maternal grandfather was Ghijsbrecht van Bokel (1268-). This must be some close relative the Ghijsbrecht Bokel who was the grandfather of Jan Vlaminc (Dirk Visschersz), which would mean (as we'll see) that Jan Vlaminc and Engelbrecht van Wassenaer van Cranenburgh were cousins to some degree.)

So it's possible that Dirric de Visker/Dirk Visscher was the same person as Amelis uten Weerde. As we will see regarding the Bulgersteyn property, Dirk Visscher/Vischer/Visser/Visker was the father of Jan Vlaminc, who was possibly the same person as Jan Sweyn Dircxsz, who was living in Bulgersteyn castle in 1390. If this is true, it connects Jan Sweyn with Gijsbert Sweym (and his descendants) with Amelis uten Weerd with the Visschers with the van de Werves. These connections are strengthened by the leenkamer entry for the rents in Kennermerland (Schoorl, Petten, Groet) in which Jan Vlaming ends up with the property that had been owned by Gerbrand Sweym and may have been confiscatd from Sweym by the count of Holland. It would be quite a coincidence if the Kennemerland Jan Vlaming (who was associated in some way with Gerbrand Sweym) was not the same person as the Bulgersteyn Jan Vlaminc was probably also known as Jan Sweyn.

Also, Moquette says something interesting regarding Vranke Visscher, a son of Dirk Visscher and his second wife Hildegonde van Cralingen. Moquette says (in translation) “It is inexplicable how on 9 Oct. 1355 Philips van der Leck called him his brother...Perhaps Hildegonde was married twice? We must not give a definite answer to this, although the appearance of Jan van Polanen and Enghebrecht van Voorschoten as witnesses when Dirk Visscher made her [Hildegonde] a life estate in 1333, perhaps also points in this direction.”

So Moquette is saying that Philips van der Leck called Frank Visscher “brother,” and that this is inexplicable unless Hildegonde had married a second time to Jan van Polanen, the father of Philips van der Leck. However, I think perhaps Moquette was being too literal—perhaps they weren't actually brothers, but cousins, who had perhaps grown up closely together as metaphorical brothers. How would they be cousins? Well, if Dirk Visscher actually was Amelis uten Weerde, note how closely Amelis uten Weerde's coat of arms resembles that of the Polanen coat of arms. Thus, if Dirk Visscher was a Polanen then his son Frank would be a cousin of some degree to Philips van der Leck, the son of Jan van Polanen. Also, Philips van der Leck had a brother Gerard who was Heer van Berkel.

Amelis' Zwager

Another way to interpret “Dirric de Visscher Amelisswagher” is that was meant to be read as “Dirric de Visscher Amelis swager” but which today would be written in as “Dirk Visscher Amelis zwager,” which in English would be translated at “Dirk Visscher, Amelis' brother-in-law”!

If this is what was meant, then we can't assume that this Amelis was Amelis uten Weerde. On the other hand, in reading and scanning through hundreds of leenkamer entries from this general time period I haven't come across a lot of people named Amelis or Melis; it wasn't a very common name. So this could be Amelis uten Weerde, and if it was it could be a clue as to the identity of Dirk Visscher's first wife. We know that Amelis uten Weerde helped Gijsbert (I) Sweym purchase the Rijswick property, so perhaps Amelis uten Weerde was a Sweym after all (perhaps from the Limburg Weerd) and Dirck Visscher had married a sister of Gijsbert (I) Sweym and Amelis uten Weerde.

Spronc van de Werve & Ruigrok

I don't have much to say about Spronc and Ruigrok van de Werve except to note that it appears that Spronc and Ruigrok (also spelled other places a Ruychroch) appear not to be first names but rather to be surname modifiers to “van de Werve.” Or, if they were first names, they may have morphed at some point into surnames. I'll also venture to speculate that this van de Werve line may have ended up in the land of Arkel in the early 1400's similarly to the Sweym line, and that this may not be a coincidence.

There was (is?) a line with the surname Sprong/h in the Land of Arkel that intermarried with the some of the descendants of Willem Ottens (including Maeijken Herberts Sprong (b. ~1608 Leerdam), married Claes Willemsz Deventer (~1552-1361), whose great-grandfather was Willem Ottens, the progenitor of the Swaim/den Hartog line). According to a few unsourced genealogies, this line of Sprongs first appears as Willem Herbaren Sprong, born in Leerbroek about1440. Both Herbaren and Willem were names used by the Rijswijk Sproncs, and I believe it's possible that this line of Sprongs in the Land of Arkel is a branch of the Rijswijk Sproncs--and might in fact be either a direct ancestor of the Swaim/den Hartog line or a close collateral ancestor.

Leenkamer: Vlaardingen “de Tempel” Property

1xxx Gerart Dode, mentioned in 1281 

1335 Gearaerd Zweym by the death of his father Ghizebrecht Zweym

1364 Ghisebrecht Zweym te Leyden as a “recht loan"

1390 Gijsebrecht Sweym te Leyden met ledige hand 

1429 Jan van der Werve by the death of his father Spronc van de Werve

1434 Herper van der Werve by the death of his brother Jan van der Werve

1458 Jonkvrouwe Steffenye van der Werve, tribute paid by Willem van Alcmade Ijsbrantsz, after transfer by her father Herper van der Werve, except for usufruct rights and life estate owned by her mother Janne van den Berghe; which are then to transfer to her sister Volcwijff in the event she dies childless.

1484 Katherine Roelofsdochter, married to Floris Bolle, by the death of her mother jonkvrouwe Steffenije van der Werve and transfers her loan to her sister Alijde Rolofsdochter, tribute by her father Roelof Andriesz

1552 Heer Aelbert Bol, priest, tribute paid by Ijsbrant van Sperwou, by the death of his mother Alijt Roelofsdochter

1555 Gerrit Bol Willemsz underage, uncle: Roelf Bol, by the death of his father Willem Bol, who died within a year of the death of his brother heer Aelbert Bol, priest.

1583 Ghijsbrecht van Beresteyn te Delft, underage, father: Pouwels van Beresteyn, by transfer from Gerrit Bol Willemsz.

With this last transation it appears the the property was no longer owned by the van de Werve family.

The last five entries from this selection occur after 1420 and mostly irrelevant to the purposes of this post; the only reason I listed them is because they show that one van de Werve married a Bolle/Bol, and I have a Dutch DNA match with the surname Bol who lives in the Hague/Wateringen area. The DNA that she and I share would likely have come from Katherine Roelofsdochter, who married Floris Bolle, through her mother Steffenye van de Werve. However, when I contacted this match she told me that the name Bol came from her stepfather and that she didn't know her biological father's surname. If this is true, then of course there is no reason to believe the DNA was related to the Bol or van de Werve families.

In this series of property transactions, the land was first owned in 1281 by Gerart Dode. Dode means dead, so Dode is probably not a surname but rather a statement that Gerart (Gerard/Gerrit) died in 1281. This Gerrit might be the father of the first Gijsbert Sweym, since this would follow the alternate-generation naming pattern this line displays: Gerrit>Gijsbert>Gerrit>Gijsbert>Gerrit.

On the other hand, there's a “Gerrit Doede” mentioned in 1281 in a different leenkamer for a property in Wateringen. Furthermore, there's a “Doede Gerritsz,” father unknown, born about 1585 possibly in Enhuizen, North Holland, listed in a Wikitree.com family tree. So it's also possible—or likely—that Gerart Dode is the same person as the Wateringen Gerrit Doede and not necessarily related to Gijsbert Sweym.

“Ghisebrecht Zweym te Leyden” means that the younger Gijbsert Sweym lived in Leiden in 1390.

We learn from the 1335 transaction that the first Gijsbert died in this year. If we assume that he was between 50 and 70 years old at his death, this means that he would have been born sometime between 1265 and 1285. (Assuming a paternal generational length of 32 years, this would place his hypothetical father Gerrit's birth year at between 1233 and 1253. In turn, this hypothetical Gerrit's hypothetical father Gijsbert's birth year would somewhere betwen 1201 and 1221. This is relevant because the Geni.com family tree shows the existence of a “Giselbertum van Broeckhuysen van Swalmen bij Arcen” who appears as a name only but with a calculated birth date of between 1205 and 1265. Because, as I have written previously, the town of Swalmen north or Roermond in Limburg is pronounced locally much like Swaim, I have hypothesized that this surname originated from Swalmen. I am not claiming here that this hypothesis is true because to prove it would require a great deal more research and in the end could probably not be proven except through Y-DNA matching, but the sketchy evidence that we do have on the Sweyms of Rijswijk somewhat strengthens this hypothesis rather than weakens it.)

The other interesting point about this series of transactions is that the younger Gijsbert Sweym end up owning this property at the death of his father Gerard, whereas with the “de Werve” property we're not certain that the younger Gijsbert ever own the property because the record is incomplete. But in any case, Spronc van de Werve did end up owning the property, presumably on the death of the younger Gijsbert, sometime between 1390 and 1429.

I speculated earlier than the count of Holland may have forfeited Gerard Sweym's property due to hypothetical involvement in the Hook and Cod conflict. In this series of transactions, the younger Gijsbrecht in 1364 takes the property as a “recht loan” rather than “met ledige hand.” As I understand it, a “recht” loan was one that died if the family line “daughtered out” with no male sons to inherit the land; this is in contrast to the immortal “onsterfelijk” loan that could be passed to female descendants (“Praktische handleiding voor het gebruik van leenkamers,” Hollandse Genealogische Databank” Leenkamers » HoGenDa ). However, the importance of this transaction is not in the kind of loan that it was, but rather that it appears to be a new loan rather than a continuation of the old loan; this would support the hypothesis that Gerard Sweym had forfeited his loan. If this is true, then the count gave the loan back to his son, perhaps wanting to punish Gerard but not wanting to create new enemies with powerful connections by dispossessing the entire family of their property.

Or I could simply be wrong, and the series of transactions was entirely normal. In either case, the fact that the land ended up being owned by Spronc van de Werve must mean that Spronc van de Werve was a son of the younger Gijsbert Sweym, since the loan, being a recht loan, must pass to a son. The loan could also be sold to another person, but there's no indication here or in the “de Werve” leenkamer entries that they were sold to Spronc van de Werve.

Monster Smaltiende Property

1335  Gerrit Sweym after Gijsbert Sweym, his father

-1390  Gijsbert Sweym met ledige hand

1429  Jan van de Werve by the death of his father Spronc van de Werve

1434  Herper van der Werve by the death of his brother Jan van der Werve

1458  Jonkvrouwe Steffenye van der Werve, tribute paid by Will van Alcmade Ijsbrantsz, after transfer by her father Herper van der Werve, except for usufruct rights and life estate owned by her mother Janne van den Berghe; which (apparently meaning the usufruct and life estate) are then to transfer to her sister Volcwijff in the event she dies childless.

1484: Katherine Roelofsdochter, married to Floris Bolle, by the death of her mother jonkvrouwe Steffenije van der Werve, who transfers her fief to her sister Alijde Roelofsdochter, tribute paid by her father Roelof Andriesz.

In this series of transactions in 1335 Gerrit Sweym takes the property from his father Gijsbert and in 1390 the younger Gijsbert inherits the land “met ledige hand” but without saying from whom.The problem is that we don't know what happened between 1335 and 1390, which is 55 years. If Gerard Sweym was was 20 when he took the land in 1335, he'd be 75 when he took the and in 1390—which is certainly possible.

Thus far we have this property and the “de Tempel” property going to Gijsbert Sweym in 1390. The Rijswijk “de Werve” property, however, went to Spronc van de Werve in 1390. We know from the “de Werve” leenkamer that Spronc died in 1429 but we don't know when Gijsbert died except that it was some time between 1390 and 1429, since he was alive in 1390 but by implication not in 1429. This leenkamer and the “de Tempel” leenkamer fail to show the transfer from from Gijsbert Sweym to Spronc van de Werve, but that transfer had to have happened because both 1429 entries state that Spronc's son Jan takes the property on the death of Spronc.

So thus far we have the following people of interest:

Dirk van de Werve: Mentioned 1281

Gerart: Possibly a Sweym, possibly died 1281

Gijsbert (I) Sweym: Died 1335, born before 1309. Married to Clementia van Foreest                                             (daughter of Herbaren van Foreest)

Gerard Sweym: Born before 1324, died 1390. Son of Gijsbert (I)

Gijsbert (II) Sweym: Born before 1364, died between 1390-1429. Son of Gerard.

Spronc van de Werve: Born before 1390, died 1429. Probably son of Gerard Sweym

Jan van de Werve: Born before 1429, died 1434. Brother of Spronc.

Herbaren/Herper van de Werve: Born before 1434, died after 1458. Brother of Spronc and                                                          Jan

Nikolaas van de Werve: Born before 1430, died after 1430. Brother of Spronc, Jan,                                                       Herbaren

It appears likely that the van de Werve brothers Spronc, Jan, Herbaren and Nikolaas were all sons of Gerard Sweym. If so, why did they all go by the surname van de Werve rather than Sweym? It's likely that they chose to use the van de Werve surname if it was more prestigious than the surname Sweym in their social circle. If Gerard Sweym had tarnished his surname in that social circle by political activities, this may be the reason that the Sweym surname had lost its prestige in that social circle. Again, however, this is just a hypothesis.

Wateringen Korentiende Property

(REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN WATERINGEN, 1281-1646 door A.J. van der Valk Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 38 (1983), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie)

1335: Gerrit Sweym

1364: Gijsbert Sweym at Leiden

1379: Heer Albert van de Wateringe by sale from Gijsbert Sweym Gerritsz.

With this sale from Gijsbert Sweym to van de Wateringe, this property passed out of the Sweym family. Albert van Wateringen was probably the then-current Lord of Wateringen. The land eventually passed to the “bastaardzoon” of Willem, the Duke of Holland, and by 1612 to Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland Frederick Henry, and later to his son William II, also Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland William II of Orange.

These leenkamer entries add nothing new to our understanding of the Sweym line except to underline the high status of the neighborhoods in which they owned property.

Monster “de Hoeve” Property

(REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTAD WEDENA, 1282-1605 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 40 (1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

DE LEENKAMER VAN DE BURCHT TE LEIDEN, 1256-1744 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 33 (1978), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie  

There are two entries for this property in two separate leenkamer transcriptions from HoGenDa. I don't know if there were two actual leenkamers that held these entries or whether it was one leenkamer partially transcribed two different times. I'll combine both entries.

The Land in the ambacht [feudal district] Monster, which the lady of Teylinghe holds on loan from lord Dirc van Wassenaer, Burggraf of Leiden (1365: large 17 morgen [measurement of area] named de Hoeve, located on the east side of the Poel.

13xx   The Lady of Teylinghe, who gave the loan to Gheret Zweym and his brother Harper

1365  Jacob Buekel Ghisebrecht Buekelsz van Ijsselmonde

The loan was split into two parcels, one 7 morgen and the other presumably 10 morgen. The transcripts don't say exactly when the parcel was split, but it

7-3-1370  Jacob Bokel receives the loan at his discretion

7-22-1370   Seven morgen of this parcel is leased to Jacob Aelwijnsz. and Pieter Vrucht for a specific amount of money per year plus 1.5 morgen of land in Wateringen named de Dijc.

8-3-1370  Jacob Bokel gives the loan to his loan-man  Ghisebrecht Sweynen at his discretion

8-5-1370: Ghisebrecht Sweymen receives the loan as his own and transfers it on 8-6-1370 to the chapter of Saint Pancras Church in Leiden

This series of transactions is easy enough to follow, but there is clearly some underlying motivation behind them that isn't clear. 

One problem is that there's no entry explaining how the property left the control of Gerard Sweym and his brother Harper and transferred to Jacob Buekel Ghisbrecht Buekelsz (this surname is spelled variously as Bokel, Boekel, or Buekel; in this post I'll spell it Bokel).

In the next entry, of July 3, 1370, five years after Jacob Bokel took possession of the land, he then splits the land into two parcels, presumably keeping one 7-morgen parcel that on 7-22-1370 he loans for a 1.5-morgn plot of land elsewhere and a yearly sum of money.

Bokel then, on 8-3-1370 or 8-5-1370, apparently gives the 10-morgen parcel of land to Gijsbert (II) Sweym as a fief loan. Gijsbert (II) Sweym then on 8-6-1370 transfers the loan to a division of the Catholic Church, probably as a donation.

The sequence of transactions is clear enough, but what's the motivation behind these transfers? How did Gerard and Harper Sweym lose the 17-acre land, and how did Jacob Bokel obtain it? And why did Jacob Bokel then split the property in two and give the larger half to Gijsbert Sweym, the son of Gerard Sweym?

In the end we can only speculate, but as I've already mentioned, I believe that the answer might be that Gerard and possibly Harper were involved in the Hook and Cod disputes which began with the dispute between the Willem, Count of Holland and his mother Margaret for control of Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut. The Hooks supported Margaret and the Cods supported Willem. The dispute between Willem and Margaret was essentially won by Willem in 1351 after his army won the Battle of Zwartewaal in which many Hooks were killed. In the aftermath, Hook lords were punished: their castles were destroyed a and their goods and authorities were given to Cod lords. In 1354 Willem and Margaret reconciled. In 1356 Margaret died, and in 1357 Willem was declared insane (and apparently was insane), and his younger brother Albert took his place as regent. Political trouble reignited and the city of Delft (Cods) rebelled against Albert. The Delft militia destroyed Polanen Castle in Monster and raided the Hague where it freed prisoners. Albert laid siege to Delft; after 10 weeks Delft surrendered on terms which protected some of the rebels but not all of the Cod lords. A few of the Cod lords escaped to Heusden Castle south of the Meuse. Albert laid siege to Heusden Castle for more than a year; the siege was ended by a treaty under which the involved Cod lords would make good with Albert and go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

By this time of course the original cause of the Hook and Cod dispute no longer existed, with Margaret dead and Willem insane and imprisoned, but clearly the contentions between the two parties had evolved into disagreements about other, deeper, issues as well; the Hook and Cod disputes continued sporadically for more than another hundred years, until 1490. It might seem odd that Albert would now persecute the Cods that had supported his brother, but the situation was obvious fluid and certainly beyond my weak understanding of the issues, and perhaps Willem was just where Albert had secretly always wanted him (and was Willem even “insane” at all, or was his claimed “insanity” a political tool of Albert?  

If Gerard Sweym had been involved in these disputes, this could explain the sequence of events indicated by the leenkamers. If Geard's lands were forfeited to the count, at least some of them may have been given to Jacob Bokel in 1370 if he was loyal to the count.. Even if emotions had cooled down by 1370, however, Bokel was probably under no legal obligation to return this land to the Sweym family. So why did he split the property and give the larger part to Gijsbert (II) Sweym, son of Gerard Sweym?

The answer to this must be that Bokel was related to the Sweym family. As we've already seen, the Batavia Illustrata entry for the van de Werve family does indicate that the Bokel family was related to the van de Werve family through the Viscounts of Leiden, but that had occurred generations before this property transaction and that common ancestry might have occurred too to far in the past to have supported Jacob Bokel's property transfer to Gijsbert (II) Sweym; by this time there must have been hundreds or thousands of descendants of those early Counts of Leiden, and Jacob Bokel couldn't possibly have obligations to all of them that were strong enough to support such actions. There must have been a much closer relationship between the two families for Bokel to have involved himself in this transaction with Gijsbert (II) Sweym.

I haven't yet definitely established this exact relationship, and it's not even absolutely certain that the Bokels are actually related to the Visschers. It's likely that they were because they succeed the Bokels as owners of Bulgersteyn, and Moquette cites an authority named Kortebrant wrote that Floris de Visscher (probably the father of Dirck Visscher, Lord of Bulgersteyn) married a sister of Dirk Bokel, and cited some evidence for this. I'm not certain of Jacob Bokel's relationship with Dirk Bokel but he was probably his brother. or nephew if Dirk had a brother named Ghisebbrecht. In any case, he was a Bokel and would have been related in some way as a cousin to the Visschers, and Dirk Vissscher's son Jan Vlaminc may have also gone by the name of Jan Sweyn (which I'll discuss in more detail in the section on the Bulgesteyn property).

I haven't established the exact relationship between the Viss(ch)ers and the Rijswijk Sweyms, either, but given the leenkamer claim that a Jan Sweyn Dircxsz was living in Bulgersteyn Castle in 1390, it's likely that there was a close relationship between the Rijswijk Sweyms and the Visschers. This may have been through the marriage of a Sweym with a Bokel.

Jacob Bokel's father was named Ghisebrecht, so this likely means he was a son of Ghisebrecht Bokel, son of Reynier Bokel—a daughter of whom, as we will see, married Dirk Viss(ch)er, Lord of Bulgersteyn Castle (and possibly the same person as Amelis uten Weerde, although this is far from established). This means that the daugher of Ghisebrecht Bokel who married Dirk Visser was Jacob Bokel's sister and that Jacob Bokel was an uncle to all of Dirk Visser's children. One of those children was Jan Vlaminc, who as we will see later was probably also called Jan Sweyn Dircxsz.

However, although this does tentatively link Jacob Bokel with a person named Sweyn, it doesn't solve the problem of finding a connection between this Sweyn of Bulgersteyn and the Rijswijk Sweyms. Jacob Bokel might want (or feel and obligation) to help his nephew Jan Vlaminc/Jan Sweyn, but why would he help the Rijswijk Sweyms?

This question puzzled me until I found a leenkamer entry that had eluded me previously because it spelled Sweym as Zueme (this is the “11 morgen over de Voerde” property in Rijswijk which we'll see later). This property in 1337 transferred from Gisbert (I) Sweym to his son Harper but has no other entry until 1383. This 1383 entry implies that the property is then owned by a Ghijsbrecht Sproncts van den Werve, who “receives the right of succession for his youngest son Ghysbrecht Bokel.”

This is the only entry I've seen that mentions Ghisbrecht Sproncts van den Werve. His name indicates that he's a son of Spronc van de Werve, who was probably a brother of Gijsbert (II) Sweym; it again strongly indicates that the surname Sweym was dropped by the lineage in favor of the surname van de Werve. But regardless of his exact relationship to the rest of the Rijswijk Sweyms, the fact that Gijsbert Sproncts van den Werve named his son Bokel definitely implies a strong relationship to the Bokel family. The exact relationship is unclear to me at this time, but we can hypothesize the possibility that Gerard Sweym had married a daughter of Ghisebrecht Bokel, who of course would be the sister of Jacob Bokel. This hypothetical marriage would then be the link between the Visser family of Bulgersteyn and the Sweym family of Rijswijk and might explain why Jan Valminc, the son of Dirk Visser, would use the name Sweyn. He would not genetically have been a Sweym, but first cousins would be Sweyms.

And this would explain why Jacob Bokel would have given property to Gijsbert Sweym: Gijsbert Swem was his nephew.

This exact relationship is just speculation at this point, but there must be a Bokel somewhere in the Sweym family tree for Ghisebrecht Sproncts van den Werve to have named a son Ghysebrecht Bokel.

My hypothesis for this series of transactions, then, is that Gijsbert (II) Sweym became involved in political actions against the interests of the count of Holland and as a result forfeited his lands in Holland (and in Zeeland, if any). Moquette claims that this happened to Floris Visser (brother of Jan Vlaminc [possibly Jan Sweyn Dirxcz], both being sons of Dirk Visser, Lord of Bulgersteyn and probably of an unknown Bokel, and Gijsbert (II) Sweym may have been his accomplice (or acted independently).

The forfeited land was given to Jacob Bokel who then kept part of it and gave part of it to Gijsbert (II) Sweym. Gijsbert (II) Sweym then donated the land to the Church as an act of contrition in partial atonement for his disloyalty to Albert, Count of Holland. This, then, would help cleanse Gijsbert (II) Sweym of his wrongdoings (who, if this was his only punishment, would escape the expensive and time-consuming pilgrimage to Jerusalem that the previously mentioned disloyal Cods from Delft were forced to take). This series of transactions does seem to be a scripted act that all parties had worked out in advance and may have been written by the Count of Holland.

This hypothesis might also explain why the Sweym surname fell out of use among this line of Sweyms, who reverted to the van de Werve name (and later also to Spronc and Ruigrok) to avoid the social taint of the name. Again, however, this is just a guess.

January 17, 2022 Note:

I'll note a couple of other connections that might support the Swalmen hypothesis of the Swaim origin—or might simply be coincidences.

First, if in fact Jan Vlaminc from Bulgersteyn, son of Dirck Visscher, was in fact also called Jan Sweym, then the origin of the alias Vlaminc is unknown. He'd probably borrowed it from his uncle, but why had his uncle used it?

If these two Jan Vlamincs were in fact Sweyms, and if the Sweyms had come from Swalmen in Limburg, then they would in fact have had an ancestor named Diederik I Flamens (von Wassenberg; son of Gerhard II von Waasenberg and Bertha de Bar-le-Duc). Diederik Flamens was a count of Teisterbant (of which the Land of Arkel was a part of or adjacent to) and the Maasgauw (the Limburg area). The lords of Heinsberg and of Randerath/Randerode were the descendants of Flamens, and the Sweyms would also be descendants through the marriage of Jutta Praet Randerode to Johan I van Broeckhuysen.

But would Sweyms in the 1300's choose as an alias the name of an ancestor from more than two hundred years in the past? This would hardly be unprecedented, since Thys Barentsen himself revived the surname Sweym from his great-great granduncle Jan Sweym). Furthermore, Diederik I Flamens may have been famous for his association with the legendary Godfrey of Bouillon; Flamens was imprisoned by Bouillon for three years and died in that prison in 1082. The story of Bouillon and Flamens might also have had some political resonance in the 1300's that I'm ignorant of.

Second, there's a village named Boukoul located less than two miles south of Swalmen. This, of course, sounds very much like Bokel, the name of the owners of Bulgersteyn just before it was owned by the Visschers, who were probaby related to the Bokels by marriage. If the Bokel line had indeed come from Boukoul, then they would likely have been related to the lords of Swalmen and were possibly themselves Sweyms. This could explain why Jan Vlaminc/Visscher might have used the alias Sweym.

Although the village of Boukoul seems today of little importance, it is located on a Roman road that ran from Heerlen (just north of Aachen) to Xanten and may have still been used in the Middle Ages. Boukoul is also located about two miles south of Hillenraad Castle, first mentioned in 1380 but of course probably older. Therefore, Boukoul may have been of some importance locally and perhaps regionally.

(Some of this information came from the nl.wikipedia.org entry “Boukoul,” which is different in some ways from the English Wikipedia entry. The Dutch entry begins: “Boukoul (Limburgs (Zjwaams/Roermonds): Oppe Boekoel))”; this apparently is saying that the Limburgish name for Boukoul is Oppe Boekoel; but what is more interesting is that it also appears to be saying that there are Limburgs sub-dialects called Zjwaams and Roermonds: Zjwaams would be the dialect from Swalme, and the spelling of this dialect reinforces the claim that the local name for Swalme sounds very much like Sweym/Swaim.)

          Gemeente Atlas Jacob Kuyper 1865-1870 : Swalmen bei Roermond (from Van Broeckhuysen - Van Swalmen - Van Oest (regis-net.de)

            Boukoul is on the lower left, Hillenraad Castle is located between Boukoul and Swalmen

The Lady of Teylinghe

The vrouwe van Teylinghe transferred this land to Gerard and Herper Sweym. She in turn had received the land as a loan from Dirc van Wassenaer, burggraaf of Leyden. I'm not certain that the Wassenaers were the same family of Burggraafs of Leiden from which the Bokels and van de Werves had descended (according to Batavia Illustrata), but in any case they were a powerful noble family (they were also Hooks in the Hook and Cod wars, as were the Polanens and Cralingens (De Arkelse oorlog (1).pdf , p. 241-2)).

One source claims that in 1358 “Johanna van Teilingen was mentioned as Lady of Bulgersteyn.” (Castles.nl - Bulgersteyn Castle). This claim is unsourced, but if true this would probably be the same Lady of Teylinge who gave the “de Hoeve” property in Monster to Gerard and Harper Sweym and would be another strong connection between the Rijswijk Sweyms and the Bulgersteyn Jan Sweyn Dircxsz.

I'm not certain of the exact relationship between the Lady of Teylinghe and the Sweyms, and I didn't find any mention of a Teylingen/Teijlingen in Moquette's “Het Slot Bulgersteijn en zijn Eigeneren” (story.pdf (x-cago.com). There must be some close relationship, however, for this Teylingen to have given land to the two Sweym brothers.

According to Geni.com one of Clementia van Foreest's great-grandmothers was Mechteld van Teylingen (c. 1190-1240), the daughter of Willem I van Teylingen; but even if this is true, this relationship seems too distant to support a close relationship between the two families based only on this one connection.

Rijswijk 11 Morgen “over de Voerde”

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE LEK EN POLANEN GELEGEN IN DELFLAND, SCHIELAND, OP HET EILAND IJSSELMONDE EN IN DE LEK, ca. 1290 - 1650 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 35, 37, 40 en 44 (1980, 1982, 1985 en 1989), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

1337: Harper Gijsbrecht Zuemenz., after order from Gijsbrecht Zueme.

1383: Ghijsbrecht Sproncts van den Werve recieves the right of succession for his youngest son Ghysbrecht Bokel, partly at the request of his oldest son Philips van den Werve.

1430: Jan van den Werve Sproncxz.

1433: Herberen van den Werve, married to Janna Kerstantsdochter uter Berge, by the death of his brother Jan van de Werve Sproncsz.

1434: Jan Willemsz. alias Jan Ruychrock, after transfer by Herberen van den Werve.

1473: Jacob Ruychrock van de Werve, by the death of his father Jan Ruychrock.

The van de Werve family retains ownership of part of this land at least into the 1600's, but these later entries fall outside our chronological range of interest for this post.

This is the only document in which I've seen the Sweym surname spelled as Zueme (however, the town of Swalmen Limburg is spelled very much like this on the old maps which I've included in the previous post: Zuamme, Suamme). Despite this unusual spelling of the name, there's no doubt that this is the same Rijswijk Sweym family that we've been researching, as the Zuemes in these leenkamer entries are clearly the same people as the Rijswijk Sweyms.

I found the other Sweym entries in the various leenkamers by searching for serveral variations of the name, but this was not one of the variants; I found this entry when searching for berg/berhe because I'd found information that Jan Vlaminc may have married Elisabeth van den Berge and that they'd had a son named Kerstant. Now in this leenkamer entry we have Herbaren van de Werve, son of Jan van de Werve Sproncxz, son of Spronc van de Werve, son of Gerard/Gerrit Sweym, marrying Janna van den Berge, daughter of Kerstant van den Berge. Assuming that the Jan Vlaminc who married Elisabeth van den Berge is indeed Jan Sweyn Dircxsz and that Jan Sweyn Dircxsz is related to the Rijswijk Sweyms (perhaps as a cousin through his mother NN Bokel), then this is a moderately endogamous marriage, which was common at that time and place as the noble families regularly intermarried amongst each other.

The most interesting bit of information from this leenkamer is probably the fact that Ghijsbrecht Sproncts van den Werve named a son Ghysebrecht Bokel (although an older son is named Philips van den Werve). I don't know if the Bokel name is meant as a kind of middle name or a surname, but this is strong evidence that the Rijswijk Sweym family was related to the Bokel family. The exact nature of this relationship is unknown to me, but as I speculated earlier, could be that Gerrit Sweym had married a Bokel; if this Bokel was a daughter of Ghisbrecht Bokel the relationship of the Bulgersteyn Jan Sweyn Dircxsz to the Rijswijk Sweyms would be resolved; Ghisebrecht Bokel would be the maternal grandfather of Jan Sweyn Dircxsz (Visscher) through one daughter and the maternal grandfather of Gerrit Sweym's children by another daughter.

This or some other similar intermarriage between the Sweym and Bokel families is further supported by the involvement of Jacob Bokel with Gijsbert Sweym in the “de Hoeve” property in Monster that we previously looked at. Together these entries come close to proof of a Bokel in the Sweym family tree, although without further evidence we don't know for certain which Sweym married which Bokel.

Kennermerland - Annual Rents in Schoorl, Petten and Groet

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN KENNEMERLAND, 1203-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 44 en 45 (1989 en 1990), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

1357: Jan van den Hove purchases the right to rentals after death of Gerbrand Zweym, except for the interest in Schoorl.

-1390: Dirk van den Hove Jansz from Gerbrand Zweym's estate "met ledige hand"

1403: Jan Vlaming on transfer by means of Dirk van den Hove from Jan van den Hove, his father, who was enfeoffed by Duke Willem V, arriving through Gerbrand Sweym 

This series of transactions is somewhat unclear to me but is probably evidence that either Gerrit Sweym or his son Gijsbert (II) Sweym did in fact have his lands confiscated by either Count Willem V of Holland or, more likely, his brother Count Albert I of Holland.

Gerbrand Zweym here is no doubt Gerard/Gerrit Sweym, son of Gijsbert (I) Sweym. There's no absolute proof of that, and Gerbrand, unlike Gerrit, is not a variation of Gerard; however, the names are quite similar and the clerk or transcriptionist who wrote the name as Gerbrand probably just made a minor mistake. The Rijswijk Sweym family at this time was the only family with that surname who appear to have owned property, so the presumption must be that this is Gerard from that family. This presumption is strengthened by the appearance of a Jan Vlaming in these transactions, because as we know that a Jan Vlaminc was involved somehow with the Rijswijk Sweyms (it isn't unusual that the name Vlaminc would alternatively have been spelled Vlaming, as the terminal -c and -g sounds appear to have been considered functionally equivalent; another example of this is Spronc and Sprong. This sound is not a hard c or g, but the gutteral ch such as in the German word ach or the Scots word loch).

In 1357 Jan van den Hove bought from Gerbrand Zweym what appears to be the future right to the rents from these properties, upon Gerbrand Zweym's death. That is, Gerbrand Zweym retains the right to the rents for his life, and on his death those rights go to Jan van den Hove. I could be misunderstanding this, but in any case, for our purposes it doesn't matter. We don't know how Gerbrand Zweym obtained the right to the rents, but we can guess that he had inherited them on the death of this father Gijsbert in 1335.

(This entry gives us no reason to believe that Jan van den Hove is related to Gerbrand Zweym, although I haven't looked very deeply into his background. A brief search of the Geni.com family tree shows a few van den Hove from the 1500's and 1600's, all of whom are from the towns of Geleen, Heerlen, Kerkrade or Schaesberg in Limburg, the latter of which is near a location called op de Hoven and a location called Broekhuizen (not the larger Broekhuizen near Arcen 50 miles to the north, but a village on the border of Germany near Schloss Rimburg); these locations are about 25-30 miles from Swalmen. There's no evidence to connect Jan van den Hove with these other van den Hoves, but I mention these possible connections because Swalmen is the centerpiece of my hypothesis as to the origin of the Sweym name; that hypothesis, however, is only peripheral to determining the potential relationship of the Rijswijk Sweyms to the Swaim/den Hartogs of the Land of Arkel.)

In 1390 Gerbrand died and Dirk van den Hove takes the property “met ledige hand.” Presumably Jan van den Hove was Dirk van den Hove's father, and Jan van den Hove had died in the 33 years since Jan bought the rights to the rent.

In 1403 Jan Vlaming obtains the property rights from Dirk van Hove, presumably by purchase, although the entry only uses the word overdracht, which means transfer.

However, the 1403 also provides the odd and confusing explanation that Dirk van den Hove had received the property rights from his father, who had been enfiefed by Duke of Holland Willem V which had arrived from Gerbrand Sweym. Does this mean that Gerbrand Sweym had been dispossesssed of this property by Willem V and that Jan van den Hove had then been enfiefed with it sometime between 1357 and 1390? This would fit the hypothesis that either Gerbrand Sweym or his son Gijsbert (II) Sweym had been involved in political activities that had cost them their property, but at least to me the wording of this last entry is too vague to be certain that this is what it means. Whoever wrote the entry could simply have been trying to provide a brief history lesson of the property rights.

But the really odd fact here is that someone named Jan Vlaming had bought the property in 1403. Was this the Jan Vlaming who was the son of Dirk Visscher of Bulgersteyn and was possibly named Jan Sweyn Dircxsz? If so, then he may have been Gerard Sweym's first cousin—but why would he be interested in this particular property that had been owned by Gerard Sweym unless he was trying to recover property that the family had lost? Recall that Jacob Bokel had also ended up with the “de Hoeve” property that had once belonged to the Sweyms, and then had given it to Gijsbert (II) Sweym who then donated it to the Church. 

Miscellaneous Leenkamer Entries Mentioning Sweym

These six entries give us less information than the previous entries. In four of them the name Sweym is mentioned only in a neighbor in a property description In the other two the Sweym i mentioned in an entry later than 1420 (1450 and 1503), which is outside our range of interest for this post but shows at least that the Sweym surname was still in use at least that late in the Rotterdam area. I'm including these entries for completeness, but I won't make any attempt to work out the exact locations of the properties or any other analysis.

Wateringen

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN WATERINGEN, 1281-1646 door A.J. van der Valk Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 38 (1983), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

Gijsbert Sweym owned a property west of a 6-morgen property in Wateringen owned in 1324 by a Jan van Rosenburg. Also to the west was the house of Ijsbrand Ogiersz “gehouden van heer Ogier van Kralingen.”

Gijsbrecht Sweym owned a property west of an 8.5 morgen land in Wateringen owend in 1324 by Ijsbrand Ogiersz.

Rijswijk

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN RIJSWIJK, 1281-1650 door J. C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39 (1984), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

Gijsbert Sweym owned a property west of a 2-morgen land in Rijswijk between the Brede weg and the Waterloze; he also owned another property west of this property along with Jan ver Aleidenz and Costijn Hendriksz.

Akersloot in Kennemerland

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN KENNEMERLAND, 1203-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 44 en 45 (1989 en 1990), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

Gerbrand Sweym owned a property south of a 1 want land in de Berg owned in 1354 by Dirk Timansz.

Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel 1450 - A quarter of land stretching from 's-Gravenweg to the IJssel

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTAD ARKEL, GELEGEN IN DELFLAND, SCHIELAND, VOORNE EN IJSSELMONDE, 1373-1648 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 31 (1976) en jrg. 40 (1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

In 1450 Kathrijn Vrederic Zweymendochter, married to Dirck Snick, transferred this property to Gerijt Victoirsz.

How Kathrijn Vrederic Zweymendochter obtained this land in the first place is not stated, but it's worth nothing that this loan was from the Hofstad Arkel. Also, later we'll see that there was a Vrerick Zweym who in 1481 lived in Gouda.

Rotterdam 1503

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTAD EGMOND IN DELFLAND, SCHIELAND, PUTTEN EN IJSSELMONDE, 1274-1660 (1724) door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 31 (1976), jrg. 34 (1979) en jrg. 43 (1988), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

In 1503 Cornelis Zweymen owned a property north of a “Een Lakenram” on the Lombaertstraat te Rotterdam. 

Lombaertstraat is probably today's generally north-south oriented Lambertusstraat located in the area of the city called Kralingen and just two streets west of the generally east-west oriented Polanenstraat.

(Further to the west in Rotterdam there's a Bulgersteyn a short street called Bulgersteyn. To the west of this is an area called Spangen and just to the west of Spangen and area called Old Matheness and New Matheness. In Spangen there's a short, generally north-south oriented street called Willem Beukelszstraat which crosses both Mathenesserstraat and Mathenesserweg. Also, in Rijswijk the “te Werve” estate still exists as a large property.)

Rotterdam “Bulgerstyn” House and Property

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN TE BLEISWIJK, HILLEGERSBERG, KRALINGEN, OVERSCHIE, ROTTERDAM, SCHIEBROEK, SCHOONDERLOO EN ZEVENHUIZEN, 1200-1648 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 41 (1986), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

HET SLOT BULGERSTEIJN EN ZIJN EIGENAREN DOOR DR. H. C. H. MOQUETTE [Hermine Christine Helene Moquette; I'm not certain what work this internet selection is taken from] story.pdf (x-cago.com)

January 11, 2022 Note:

Since posting this I've come across a reference in a book to what is apparently an entry in the “Rent rolls of St. Catharine's Convent at Utrecht.” In the description of a property in Rotterdam, two adjacent properties are mentioned, one to the east of the property owned by Jan van der Aer and one to the west of the property owned by Jan Zweym Dirxzoen (the surname ending with an -m).

In the book's index entry for Zweym, Zweym is called “house-owner at Rotterdam 1367+”

This Jan Zweym Dirxzoen is almost certainly the same person as the Jan Zweyn Dircxz from the Bulgersteyn leenkamer, so I think it's now clear that for entries that were originally handwritten we can assume that in a transcription of such an entry, whether the name ends with an -n or an -m was simply a matter of interpretation of the handwriting by the transcriber rather than a true distinction between two different names.

Sources Concerning the Hospitallers of St. John in the Ntherlands 14th-18^th Centuries, Johanna Maria van Winter, Brill 1998, p. 386 (Sources concerning the hospitallers of St John in the Netherlands: 14th-18th ... - Google Books )

My information on Bulgersteyn comes primarly from two sources: the count of Holland's leenkamer entry for this property and the 42-page study on the history and owners of the house and property by Moquette. I haven't read Moquette's entire work because the last half of it is about it's owners after it passed out of the hands of the Visscher family in 1391 and thus is not of interest for the purpose of researching the Swaim/den Hartog ancestry. Furthermore, I'm not confident that I always understand the meaning of everything that Moquette intended to convey, mostly due to uncertainty in translation.

There's no leekamer entry indicating that a Sweym ever owned this property, which is called either Bulgersteyn or Bulgersteyn castle. The only reason to believe a Sweym ever had anything to do with this property is a brief mention in the leenkamer description of the property that in 1390 it was “bewoond door Jan Sweyn Dircxsz.” (“occupied by Jan Sweyn Dirckxsz”). Moquette makes no mention at all of a Jan Sweyn Dircxsz, although I assume it does exist. although I don't have access to the original document but rather only to the transcription of it by C. Hoek.

This one parenthetical comment in the leenkamer is pretty thin evidence from which to hypothesize that Jan Sweyn Dircxsz was probably the same person as a man named Jan Vlaminc, son of Dirck Visscher.  This hypothesis is really based only on the coincidence of first names (Jan) and patroynymic names (Dircxsz), as well as that both must have been alive about the same time. Most of my information on the Bulgersteyn Jan Vlaminc comes from Moquette, who worked for more than 30 years as a archivist at the Rotterdam Municipal Archives (Hermine Moquette - Wikipedia), so we can assume that her information is accurate. As we've seen, a person named Jan Vlaminc is mentioned in two leenkamer entries involving the Rijswijk Sweyms, and although it's impossible to be certain that this is the same Jan Vlaminc as the Bulgersteyn Jan Vlaminc, I think that an analysis of the people mentioned by Moquette in relation to Bulgersteyn does support the hypothesis that this is probably the same Jan Vlaminc and that he also went by the name Jan Sweyn, and that he was related to the Bulgersteyn Sweyms probably through his mother who may have been a Bokel. 

I don't think we need to be concerned with the fact that Jan Sweyn Dircxsz was spelled by the leenkamer transcriber with an -n rather than an -m, as we know from Barend van Dooren's article that in old handwritten documents it's often difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Even if I'm wrong that Jan Sweym Dircxsz was the same person as Jan Vlaminc, I don't think that it negates the hypothesis that the Rijswijk Sweyms are probably the ancestors of the Swaims/den Hartogs from the Land of Arkel. As we'll later see, there was a Dirk Visser from Rotterdam who owned land in the early 1400's in Lang Nieuwland adjacent to parcels owned by Jan Knobbout and Adriaan van Megen (den Hartoch), and not far from where a Jacob van de Werve owned land in the Achterdijk through the Knobbout family. Another adjacent lot was owned by “Kunigonde, 's-dekensdocther van Deventer," about whom I know nothing at this time but who might have been the source of the “van Deventer” surname used by some later den Hartogs. The conjunction of all these surnames in this small area isn't likely to be a coincidence, but rather an indication that this area might be the cradle of the Swaim/den Hartog line in the Land of Arkel, and so I think it's worth pursuing the clue that this Dirk Visser from Rotterdam might have been related to Jan Sweyn Dircxsz of Bulgersteyn, who might have been the son of an earlier Dirk Visscher, Lord of Bulgersteyn, and that they all might have been related to the Sweyms of Rijswijk. This Dirk Visser from Rotterdam may have been the son of Floris Visscher, the brother of the first Jan Vlaminc, who was the uncle of the Jan Vlaminc we are discussing. And possibly a sister or brother of either this Dirk Visser from Rotterdam or Jacob van de Werve (who may have been a son of either Gijsbert (II) Sweym or of his son Spronc van de Werve) might have been Ot, the progenitor of the Swaim/den Hartog line, or the wife of Ot. Ot might have been one of the Knobbouts, for the reason that apparently the family was or had been the lord of Otteland (Ottoland), and therefore such a person might have been called Ot as a nickname. However, this hypothesis still leaves room for Ot to have been some other Otto. 

Here are the relevant leenkamer entries:

A Residence with a House named Bulgersteyn, in 1390 occupied by Jan Sweyn Dircxsz, west of Rotterdam

1333 Diederic die Vischer, with the permission of his eldest son Florens, gives the property on his death to the oldest child of his wife Hildegonde.

1390 Jonkvrouwe Rikaerde living in Delft, “met ledige hand”: Dirk die Visscher Floris de Visschersz with only the house, subject to the life estate of his aunt.

1391 Oudzier Gherijt Boeyenz.

If I understand Moquette correctly, the Visscher family had orginally come from Zeeland and had land in Elskerzee, Bridorp and Looperskapelle on the island of Schouwen. This is the island north of Beveren, on which Waarde was located (potentially the origin of Amelis uten Weerde).

The Diederic die Vischer from the 1333 entry was Dirk Visscher, “Lord of Bulgersteyn,” son of Florish Fisscher. Floris also had another son named Van Vlaminck. Moquette wrote (in translation): “Dirc die Visscher had been married twice. The name of his first wife has not been handed down to us. Sons from that marriage were Floris, Jan Vlaminc and Ghise. Before April 7, 1333 Dirc die Visscher had remarried, this time to Jonckvrouwe Hildegonde....” According to Moquette, Hildegonde was probably the daughter of Ogier van Cralingen.

If I've translated the 1333 leenkamer entry properly, Dirk Visscher gave the future right to the land to the oldest son, or if no son the oldest daughter, from this second marriage. This agreement was supposedly made with the consent of Dirk's oldes son Floris, because he would have had inheritance rights to the property.

In 1390 (or possibly before) Dirk Visscher must have died because Rikarde, the daughter of Dirk Visscher and Hildegonde, appears to be transferred ownerhip of the house “met ledige hand,” although subject to a life estate of her aunt (that apparently wasn't recorded). This aunt appears to have been Aleydis van Cralingen, Hildegonde's sister.

So who is the “Jan Sweyn Dircxsz” who resided in Bulgersteyn in 1390? It's possible that he was simply a friend of the family who was allowed to live there, but in that case it's doubtful that his name would have been recorded in the leenkamer. More likely it was a son of Dirk Visscher, especially since the patronymic indicates that his father's name was Dirck (although Dirk was a very common name). Jan Vlaming had obviously taken that name from his uncle of the same name, and may have used “Jan Sweyn” as an alias. But then, where had that name come from? Since his father was a Visscher and not a Sweym, he must have taken the name either from a female ancestor from his father's side but more likely his mother's side. His grandmother who'd married Floris Visscher was unkown but according to Moquette (as previously mentioned) probably a sister of Dirk Bokel; however, his mother appears to be unknown. Was she a Sweym? A daughter of Gijsbert (I) Sweym and Clementia Foreest? This could explain Jan Vlaming's purchase of the rents in Kennemerland that had previously been owned by Gerrit Sweym.

It's possible that when Rikaerde took ownership of Bulgersteyn in 1390 that she kicked Jan Vlaminc out or that he moved out on his own. Did he move to the land probably owned by his father or brother in Lang Nieuwland?

Unresolved Issues with Jan Vlaminc

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN TE MATENESSE EN SCHIEDAM, 1200-1622 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39 (1984), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

In the leenkamer for the ambacht of Matenesse (referenced above), we see that the Bokels are the lords of Matenesse. In this post I'm not going to try to unravel all the relationships of these related families, but this is something to note.

My primary interest in these leenkamer entries is on the 1381 entry in which a Lijsbette van den Berghe is noted to be the brother of Dirck van Matenesse and the wife of a “Janne Vlaminck Wouter Gerijtsz.”

This Jan Vlaminck appears to be the son of a Wouter Gerritsz. Wouter Gerritsz of course was the son of someone named Wouter. This must be a different Jan Vlaminc than Jan Vlaminc Dirck Visschersz (possibly Jan Sweyn) or his uncle, Jan Vaminck Floris Visschersz. But who was Wouter Gerritsz and why did his son use the name Jan Vlaminnc?

Jan Vlaminc/k is a recurring name in the Visscher family. Lijsbette van den Berghe was a sister of Dirck van Matenesse, and Dirck van Matenesse was in 1327 stated in this leenkamer to be the son of a “Dieric Bokel.” This is probably the same Dirk Bokel whose sister married Dirk Visscher, Lord of Bulgersteyn, and was the father of Jan Vaminc who resided in Bulgersteyn Castle in 1390. Were both of these Jan Vlamincs the same person?

Who was Wouter Gerritsz? Was he the son of Gerrit Sweym, and thus Janne Vlaminc Wouter Gerritsz was the grandson of Gerrit Sweym?

But then who was the person referred to in the 1390 leenkamer entry for Bulgersteyn as Jan Sweyn Dircxsz?

I don't know the anwers to these questions. Clearly there was a Sweym living in Bulgersteyn Castel and thus somehow related to the Visschers and Bokels, but the exact relationship remains to be determined.

Hook and Cod “Wars”

Moquette wrote that Floris Visscher, the brother of Jan Visscher and son Dirk Visscher, Lord of Bulgersteyn, was involved in the Hook and Cod troubles of the mid to late 1300's. She wrote (in translation): “The exile and reparations of the Hook nobles in 1351 gave [Floris] ready reason to get rid of [an adversary named Willem Nagel]...Willem Nagel was removed from office and (Jan) Vlaming, Floris' uncle, appointed in his place....” Nagel was also imprisoned and a great deal of blood might have been shed. Moquette writes that when Willem V in 1354 reconciled with his mother, justice then had to be done to the combatants in the fights that had occurred, and that Floris's actions were judged, and he was given a minimum sentence by the judge who had invoked mitigating circumstances. However, “For Floris Visscher, there were bad consequences in the 1358 replacement of the mad duke [Willem] by his brother Albert. It is plausible that Floris was caught up in the turmoil of the Cods who took an active part against this prince, whose center was Delft; the fall of Delft will also have overthrown him [Foris]; his goods will have been confiscated and he himself will have been banished.” On March 16, 1359, “all the property that Floris de Visscher had forfeited and that was located within Holland...[was given to] Dirc van Kralingen, a son of Ogier, who like his father belonged to the Hook party and, for what he had done wrong against Duke Willem had been convicted and paid a fine....What goods did Floris forfeit? All indications about this are lacking, but the the property in Voorne in any case seems to have come back into his possession later.”

(The property in Voorne on Floris' death in 1687 went to his son Dirck Visscher—and possibly the property in Lang Nieuwland in the Land of Arkel, although Moquette says nothing about this.)

So it's certain that Floris Visscher had been involved in the Hook and Cod struggles and had been punished for it, although he appears to have been later substantially rehabilitated, probably because of the powerful families he was related to, whom Albert would not want to unnecessarily antagonize. Is it possible that Gijsbert Sweym, who was about the same age as Floris, had also been involved in these political activities along with his cousin?

Teylingen Connection to Bulgersteyn?

One source (Castles.nl - Bulgersteyn Castle) states that in 1358 “Johanna van Teijlingen was mentioned as the Lady of Bulgersteyn.” There's no reference provided for this assertion and Moquette says nothing about it, so that's something to investigate further. If it's true, it could tie Jan Sweyn to Gheret and Harper Zweym because it was the lady “Tylinghe” who gave Gheret and Harper Zweym the Leiden property.

However, we saw that the “de Hoeve” property in Monster was given to Gheret Sweyn also by “the Lady of Teylinghe,” and also that it ended up in the hands of a Bokel—in this case, Jacob Beukel the son of Ghisebrecht Buekel. This is almost certainly the same Ghisebrecht Bokel who was the father of the Bokel who was the first wife of Dirk Visscher. Therefore, this is a direct tie between the Visschers and the Gijsbert-Gheret-Gijsbert Sweym family of Rijswijk and “te Werve.”

Utrecht City Archive

1445

City letter from Bruges, in which Wernaer Granbeke and others, at the request of the elders of the German Hanse in Bruges, make a statement about the ownership of goods from a ship returning from Oestlant [Estonia] and stranded near Amsterdam, which are being held in custody at Vianen, -- and further authorize Jan Zwijn and Willem van Hemerde to receive these goods and to do the necessary for them (Vidimus of Bishop Rodedolph dd. 1446) (translation). (Regesten van het archief der Stad Utrecht #835)

1446

This repeats the 1445 letter but adds that the 1445 City letter had been addressed to “den heer van Brederode en van Vyanen,” who is further identified as “Reynoldt van Brederode” (who would be Reinoud II van Brederode (1415-1473). (as above, #837).

From these two letters we see that “Jan Zwijn” was working for Reynoldt van Brederode in the shipping/import business. This is too early in time for this to be Jan Zweym Willems, who was born in about 1470. However, it is quite interesting that there was a Jan Zwijn working for a Brederode a generation before Jan Zweym Willems had enough of an interaction with (probably) the grandson of Reynoldt van Brederode that Ing. H. den Hertog wrote: “Ergo: hoort Jan Zweynen Willemsen bij de heer van Brederode? Mogelijk is het zo....” (“Therefore: does Jan Sweynen Willemsen belong to the Lord of Brederode? Perhaps it is so....” (GENEALOGIE VAN DE FAMILIE HERTOCH, HARTOCH, DEVENTER UIT DE VIJFHEERENLANDEN.pdf , p. 13).

It seems unlikely that these two Jan Sweyms working for the Brederodes were unrelated. The problem is proving the relationship. The first Jan Zwijn can't be Jan Zweym Willems' father if Willem Ottens was Jan Zweym Willems' father, so at most they should be cousins. There's the possibility that Jan Zweym Willems really wasn't the son of Willem Ottens, but then why would Thys Barentsen have used that name?

Gouda City Bills

1477

Loaned Money: On the deed of Willem Zweyms house

1480

Construction (Bouwen): “Gryt in den Hoem an bij Jan Gerytsz Zweym”

1481

Miscellaneous (Diversen): “meester Vrerick Zweym”

1495

Miscellaneous (Diversen): “geld om de getuigenissen te horen van meester Vreric Sweym vanwege de proost” (money to hear the testimony of meester Freric Sweym because of the proost (dean?))

1499

Reizen (travel): “meester Frederick Sweym” - “van Utrecht naar Gouda om de stad op de hoogte te stellen van hetgeen hij besproken had met Claes Basijn” (from (to?) Utrecht neear Gouda to inform the city of what he had discussed with Claes Bazijn)

Claes Bazijn is mentioned once in the Utrecht archives (81 1492 July 16):

The chapter at Dom acknowledges to Claes Bazijn on behalf of Real Reali, merchant of Lucques, that he owes 267½ gold St. Andries guilders, as the remainder of the purchase price of 913½ of those guilders for 101½ cubits of red crimson velvet. Lucques is the French word for the city of Lucca, Italy. Claes Bazijn appears to be an agent for Utrecht involved in trade, and possibly Sweym is his counterpart in Gouda.

Summary of the Utrecht and Gouda Sweyms

From these entries we know that Sweyms were living in Gouda and in Utrecht in the 1400's, and from the 1503 leenkamer we know that at least one family was living in Rotterdam as well.

Most of the Swaim/den Hartog line during the 1400's were living in the Land of Arkel and were primarily farmers. The notabe exception to this are the descendants of Adriaen Willemsen Willems de Backer/van Megen, two of whom lived in Utrecht, and the line of Willem Adriansen who appear to have moved to Dordrecht and then to Ridder kerk. Another exception is Jan Zweym Willems, who may have worked for Reinoud III van Brederode.

In the end, the Sweyms from Gouda and Utrecht don't move us any closer to the answers to the Swaim/den Hartog ancestry because we can't show that they're connected to either the Rijswijk or the Bulgersteyn Swaims. The Foreest line did live adjacent to Gouda and this might be one reason the Gouda Sweyms ended up in Gouda, but that would have to be proven with documentary evidence, which I haven't seen (but I hasten to remind the reader that I'm not an expert on Dutch genealogy and I only have online access to archives and leenkamer documents, and although I've spent many hours searching leenkamers, I don't claim to have truly looked at more than a fraction of them).

Accounts of the Laagschout of 's-Hertogenbosch 1505-1525

schoutsrek.094.doc (live.com)

Sweyms lived in Den Bosch, County of Brabant, in the early 1500's. I haven't researched these Sweyms at all and I don't know if these Sweyms are related to the Rijswijk Sweyms.

The website I obtained these names from is apparently abstracted from a list of lawsuits, so each entry actually contains two names of people who were involved in a dispute (the word tegen between the two names appears to have the same meaning as versus). No date is given in the abstract, but it appears that every entry occurred between 1505 and 1525.

Here are the Sweym entries:

Heyn Sweymmen tegen Alyt Wichmans

Heyn Zweym tegen Peet ervan Hynden

Heyn Zweym – idem

Henrick Sweym tegen Jacop Dilissen

Henrick Zweym tegen Geryt Thijssen

Goessen van Uden tegen Adriaen Zweym and Janne Zweym

The surname here is spelled three different ways, although Zweym is the most common. Heyn Sweymmen is no doubt the same person as Heyn Zweym, and may also be the same person as Henrick Sweym/Zweym (he also appears to be highly litigious, if the plaintiff is the first name listed). Thus, this list may have the names of only three different Sweym individuals: Henrick, Adriaen and Janne. 

Did the Swaim/den Hartog Line from the Land of Arkel Descend from the Rijswijk/Bulgerstey Sweyms?

This is the question that needs to be answered, and I've been unable to prove a connection. However, I have found some documentary evidence that tends to support this relationship, as well as autosomal DNA evidence that may support it.

There's also the question of why a branch of the Rijswijk/Bulgersteyn Sweyms would end up in the Land of Arkel and why their descendants would end up as well-to-do farmers rather than lords of some ambacht. I think the answer to this question is possibly that this branch of the family was a casualty of the Arkel war that Jan van Arkel fought with Willem, Count of Holland. Jan van Arkel lost the war and his lands were forfeited to Willem. This war lasted from 1401-1412 and was revived briefly in 1417 by Jan van Arkel's son Willem, who was killed while taking Gorinchem. Lords who fought in this war against the count had their land seized and were probably banished from Holland. I'm not clear on whether immediatley after the war the Land of Arkel was part of Guelders or of Holland, but in any case if a member of the Sweym/van de Werde line who had fought for Arkel in that war may have settled down quietly in Arkel (and there's some evidence this is true). If so, ties to their relatives in the Rotterdam-Den Haag area may have weakened with time and the line in the Land of Arkel lived mostly as farmers from that time.

Here are relevant names of those who fought on the side of Arkel during the Arkel war:

Those fighting with Arkel in 1402:   Van Ranst and his son

Friends of Jan van Arkel, May 1406:   Jan van der Werve    

                                                             Klaas Knobbout

                                                             Knobbout Waddinxz

Allies of Jan van Arkel, expelled by the truce of 7 December 1406:

                                                            Knobbout Jansz

                                                            Jan Spronk

                                                            Knobbout van Asse

(De Arkelse Oorlog 1401-1412, M.J. Waale, 1990 De Arkelse oorlog - PDF Gratis download (docplayer.nl) )

So we see that a Jan van der Werve and a Jan Spronk did in fact fight on the side of Jan van Arkel. 

I included van Ranst in this list because the van Ranst family of Ranst, Flanders (Belgium) had married into the van de Werve family. Thus, the van de Werves and van Ransts were possibly related to the Rijswijk and Bulgersteyn Sweyms, and Jan van de Werve may very well have been a descendant of one of those Sweyms.

I included the four Knobbouts because, as we'll see, the Knobbout family had at least a couple of real estate transactions with the van de Werve family in the early 1400's, and later in the 1400's and 1500's with sons of Willem Ottens. Thus, he's a link between the van de Werve family and the Swain/den Hartog family.

Is Lang Nieuwland the Birthplace of the Sweym/den Hartog Line?

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN TE MATENESSE EN SCHIEDAM, 1200-1622 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39 (1984), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTAD WEDENA, 1282-1605 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 40 (1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

In the 1400's and 1500's the following people all owned land in the small area of Lang Nieuwland along the Achterdijk, located just of of Leerdam:

Jacob van de Werve                                          1424

Dirk Visscher from Rotterdam                            1413?

Hendrik Knobbout                                               1363

Machteld Knobbout, daughter of Hendrik           1407

Dirk Knobbout                                                     1407

Nikolaas Knobbout ( -1408)                                1407

Nikolaas Knobbout II                                           1408

Jan Knobbout Hendriksz                                     1451

Hendrik Knobbout de Oude                                 1487

Jonge Hendrik Knobbout van Os                         1493

Jan Knobbout Jansz                                            1554

Willem Ottens                                                      1481

Gherit Ottens                                                       1501

Jan Geritsen (son of Gherit Ottens)                     1501

Gheertruyt Gheritsdr                                           1504,1525

Adriaen Willemsen                                              1507

Ot Willemsen                                                       1507

Joris Geritsen                                                      1518

Adriaan van Megen de oude (te Utrecht)            1554

Adriaan van Megen (de jonge), son of Gijsbert   1554

Willem van Megen te Utrecht ( -1585)                1571

This list isn't comprehensive for the Knobbouts, at least. For some of the Swain/den Hartog line my source for some of the leenkamer entries was Ing. H. den Hertog, “Genealogie van de Familie Hertoch.”

The last group beginning with Willem Ottens and Gherit Ottens are known members of the Swaim/den Hartog line.

There's a 40+ year gap in the Knobbouts between the early 1400's and the mid 1400's, and a 50+ year gap between the late 1400's and the mid 1500's. This may mean that they weren't buying and selling property during those times or it could mean that the property records at that time were not properly kept, or that I failed to find those records (I don't claim to have made a comprehensive effort to do so).

In 1481 Willem Ottens would have been about 40 years old. In 1501 he would have been about 60 years old and his older brother Gherit about 65. 

Given that we know the Rijswijk Sweyms must have married into the van de Werve family because various van de Werves (Spronc, Jan, Willem, Nikolaas) appear to be the sons of Gijsbert (II) Sweym, I think it's highly likely that the Swaim/den Hartog line in the land of Arkel may have come from either the Jacob van de Werve who lived in Lang Nieuwland or possibly from someone from the Visscher family that also owned property in Lang Nieuwland.

Jacob van de Werve may have been a brother or son of the Jan van de Werve who was on the May 1406 list of friends of Jan van Arkel. Knobbout Jansz and Klaas Knobbout were also on that list, and Knobbout Jansz, Jan Spronk, and Knobbout van Asse were on a December 1406 list of “bondgenoten” of Jan van Arkel. These men fought for Jan van Arkel and when their cause was lost Jacob van de Werve may have decided to remain in the Land of Arkel rather than returning to Rijswijk or Rotterdam. Possibly he was disgusted with how the people from that region mistreated the people of the Land of Arkel during the Arkel war, as described by Abraham Kemp.

van Deventer

In the description of the “28 morgen land with hofstede in Lang Nieuwland in het land van Arkel” was included the name Kunigonde 's-dekensdochter van Deventer. The 's is a contraction for the old possessive des, so Kunigunde was the daughter of a deacon from Deventer. I know nothing about this Kunigunde, but she is of some interest because she or someone else from her family could potentially be the source of the van Deventer name that the den Hartog line adopted first as one of the many names of Adriaen Willemsen (van Megen/den Hartoch), son of Willem Ottens. She was a neighbor of Adriaen, so I think she or someone else from her family was likely the source of the van Deventer name. Perhaps she or one of her family was Adriaen's mother or of some other proto-den Hartog, either through a marital or non-marital relationship. Or perhaps Adriaen was smitten with her and used the name to feel closer to her. This isn't something that likely to ever be proven or disproven, but the simplest explanation is often the correct explanation; here we have a known family from Deventer living almost next door to Willem Otten's family, so there's probably no need to invoke any other potential explanation that isn't equally as simple and likely as that of the name deriving from this neighbor.

The following people lived from the town of Arkel “stretching from the Broeksteet to Gerard Dirksz,” although I'm unsure of the exact location:

Hendrik van de Werve Jacobsz 1434

Bele van de Werve, daughter of Jacob 1473

Hendrik Knobbout de Oude 1487

Here are Knobbout-van de Werve property transactions from the leenkamers:

3 1/2 morgen land in Arkel in de achterweide en in de achterdijk

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie 

1407 Dirk Knobbout for Nikolas Knobbout “are good like” (“zijn goed zoals”) van Arkel.

1408 Nikolaas Knobbout bij dode van Nikolaas, his father, enfiefed by Jan, heer van Arkel.

1424: Jacob van de Werve on transfer for [from?] Nikolaas Knobbout, who loved Jan van Arkel.

In the 1407 transaction “zijn goed zoals” probably means “who liked,” and in the 1424 transaction it appears that it was Nikolaas Knobbout who was said to have loved Jan van Arkel, rather than Jacob van de Werve, although it may have been true of both. This Nikolaas Knobbout is almost certainly the same person as the “Klaas Knobbout” from the 1406 list of friends of Jan van Arkel. It's possible that “Jacob van de Werve” is the same person as “Jan van der Werve” from the same 1406 list, although that merely a guess.

It seems odd that these property transaction records would have included these emotional sentiments for Nikolaas Knobbout for Jan van Arkel, as few of the others I've read had editorialized in this way. However, the downfall of the Arkels as a power in the land was undoubtedly a very emotional event for many involved in it. By the way, at the time of this last transaction Jan van Arkel was still alive, although imprisoned (apparently in either Gouda or Leerdam).

The land in this transaction was said to have been in “the achterweide and in the achterdijk,” presumably meaning that it included parts of both of those locations. The achterweide is presumably what is called today the “Achterwet.” (presumably the “Acterwetering”), and on a map included in the Wikipedia article “Leerdam” is shown to be part of the Lang Nieuwlandisch Wetering. A wetering is a drainage channel, but presumably it also means in this context the area served by the particular named drainage channel.

The 1424 transfer of the property to Jacob van de Werve wasn't described as a sale, but I don't know if this necessarily means it was a gift. But given the pro-Jan van Arkel sentiment expressed in the transaction record, it's possible this was meant as a gift to Jacob van de Werve for his support of Jan van Arkel.

A Half Farm in Arkel Next to the Late Hendrik Knobboutt

(Updated 2-1-2022)

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie 

1434 Henrik van de Werve Jacobsz. on the death of his father

1473 Willem Jacobsz for Bele, daughter of Jacob van de Werve, his wife

1473 Jan Knobbout Hendriksz, mentioned 1474, by transfer for Willem Jacobsz vor Bele van de Werve, his wife

1487 Hendrik Knobbout the old, after which transfer to Lambert van Everdingen Gerardsz. for the Regularissenklooster in Arkel on the Dam, to be redeemed for [amount of money] within two years.

The 1434 entry states that Hendrik van de Werve Jacobsz inherited the land on the death of his father, who of course would be Jacob van de Werve. Jacob van de Werve would likely have been the same Jacob van de Werve who also in 1424 obtained from Nikolaas Knobbout the 3.5-morgen land in the Achterdijk. Because Jacob van de Werve was associated with the Knobbouts and lived in the Land of Arkel in the early 1400's, we can speculate that he was involved in the Arkel War on the side of the Arkels. The real question is whether he was a descendant of Gerrit Sweym or his son Gijsbert (II) Sweym; perhaps a brother, uncle or cousin of Spronc van de Werve. Possibly he was a son of hte Jan van de Werve who in 1406 was listed as a “friend of Arkel.”

The April 1, 1473 entry transfer is to a Willem Jacobsz for his wife Bele Jacobsdr van de Werve, presumably the daughter of Jacob van de Werve (and therefore sister to Hendrik van de Werve). The reason for this transfer isn't stated, but it was possibly due to the death of Hendrik van de Werve.

The Willem Jacobsz, husband of Bele van de Werve, would obviously not also have been a son of Jacob van de Werve because he could then not have married his sister. Willem Ottens (of the Swaim/den Hartog line) had a son named Jacob, but that Jacob was born about the time of this entry so he could not have had a son who was married at this time (and apparently had no sons at all, but only daughters).

The June 4, 1473 entry says that Jan Knobbout Hendriksz was mentioned in 1474 and that the property was transfered to him by Willem Jocobsz for his wife Bele van de Werve.

Tthe 1487 entry says that the property was transferred to Hendrik Knobbout the old, after which it was transferred to the “regularissenklooster te Arkel op de Damme, te lossen met [200 units of currency] twee jaar.” This appears to be a loan to the “regularissenklooster” rather than a pure donation. Klooster mean monastery, so this was the Regularissen Monastery at the dam on the Linge in Arkel which I mentioned in my 2020 post as the location where supposedly the Lordship of Arkel was first established in the late 600's when Jan van Arkel was miraculously guided to that location by a swan. Whether or not there was any truth to that story, it was probably not an accident that Hendrik Knobbout donated this land to that particular monastery; rather, it's likely that he meant it as a tribute t the Arkels for the monastery's symbolic value as the origin of the Arkel dynasty. 

28 Morgen Land with Hofstede in Lang Nieuwland in the Land of Arkel

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

The description of the land:

28 morgen land with homestead in Lang Nieuwland in het land van Arkel.  On one side: Kunigonde ‘s-dekensdochter van Deventer. On another side: Koen van Herlaar, property named Vokens farm: 18 morgen. On another side:  Lambert Millinc, knight, lord Rutger Adelissenz., priest, property named damsel Armgarden farm. On another side: Dirk Visser van Rotterdam, property named ‘s-Kosters farm, free from tithes, tribute, tariffs, fees to neighbors, and from which lord Jan van Arkel held the daily court.

Presumably this 28-morgen property was originally allodial land owned by the Arkels rather than land loaned from the Count of Holland or anyone else. 

The first recorded transaction is the transfer of the property in 1413 from Jan van Herlaar van Meerwijk (“who loved lord Jan van Arkel”) to the knight Willlem van Gent.

In 1451 The land transferred from Willem van Gent heer Willemsz to Jan Knobbout. In 1487 the land transferred to Jan Knobbout's son Hendrik and then in 1493 to Hendrik's son Hendrik.

The land was then split into five lots: A,B,C,D,E and some of these were split again into F,G and H.

Note that in this land description, as was customary, the properties of the names of the owners of the surrounding the properties were listed. In this case there were five neighboring properties listed. Because I believe this property may be a key piece of evidence linking the Swain/den Hartog line with the Rijswijk Sweym line, I think we should look at who were the neighbors of Adriaen van Megen's family to get some idea of their social status and family history. From this leenkamer alone we don't know the histories of these adjacent properties and we don't know whether the people owning the properties actually lived there or only kept it as an investment, but nonetheless there might be much to learn from knowing who they were.

November 2022 Note: Jan van Herlaer probably originally obtained the land from Count Willem VI (also Duke of Bavaria) after her changed sides from Jan van Arkel to Holland in the Arkel War. Willem van Gent obtained the property through his 1413 marriage to Gerarda van Herlaer, daughter of Jan van Herlaer. The Willem van Gent in the 1451 transfer to Knobbout was probably the son of the first Willem van Gent.  

Kunigonde 's-dekensdochter van Deventer

I don't know whether the identity of this person can be discovered, but her father must have been a deacon in the Church in Deventer.

Various members of the den Hartog family, apparently beginning with Adriaan, son of Willem Ottens, used the surname “van Deventer.” The reason for this is unknown, but I think it's quite possible that Kunigonde or someone else in her family was the inspiration for this surname. It could have come about through the marriage of a (proto) den Hartog with a “van Deventer” or through a non-marital relationship or simply from sentimentality. This can probably never be proven, but this appears to be the most parsimonious explanation for the appearance of the name in the den Hartog line.

The van Herlaars

Primary source: De Herlaars in het Midden-Nederlandse rivierengebied (ca. 1075 – ca. 1400), AGJ van Doornmalen, Dissertatie Fam van Herlaar (universiteitleiden.nl); 1887_56323-Full text.pdf

The leenkamer doesn't indicate how Jan van Herlaar originally obtained possession of the 28-morgen property, but he likely obtained it in 1412 after Arkel's lands were confiscated by the Count of Holland (apparently even the Arkel allodial lands).

Koen van Herlaar also owned land adjacent to th 28-morgen land. Because it appears that at this time there was only one Koen van Herlaar, it is almost certain that this Koen was the son of Jan van Herlaar (perhaps van Heul), the son of Johan (Schots) van Herlaar.

The identity of the Jan van Herlaar who first owned the 28-morgen and is less clear because although Koen had a brother named Jan, he also had a cousin named Jan (son of Gerard), and the daughter of this cousin married Willem van Gent who obtained the land in 1413. Thus, it's likely that the Jan van Herlaar who owned the 28-morgen land was Koen's cousin—Jan Gerardsz rather than Jan Jansz.

On the other hand, van Doornmalen states that the sons of Jan (rather than of Jan's brother Gerard) “Koen, Jan, Arnold and Gerard, named Van Herlaar (van der Heul), were closely involved in the Arkel war. Initially (1401) supported they called the lord of Arkel, but later the brothers sided with the Dutch count. He reimbursed Jan van Herlaar van der Heul, the grandson of Koen van Oosterwijk, for the destruction of his house Ter Heul. In 1407 he received the high lordship and the house Oosterwijk near Leerdam and Kedichem as a Arkels loan. The consequences of the Arkel war dragged on for the Van Herlaar brothers until 1416.” So perhaps the Jan who owned the 28-morgen property was in fact the brother of Koen, not his son. This quote also brings into question the loyalty of these brothers to the van Arkels near the end of the war (M.J. Waale states that Coen van Herlaar was captured by Willem's troops on August 12, 1412, and imprisoned in Heusden until August 24, when he reconciled with Willem; after doing penance and paying a fine he was freed and confiscated property was returned).

My guess is that the Jan van Herlaar who first possessed the 28-morgen property was in fact the son of Gerard and cousin, not brother, of Koen van Herlaar who owned property adjacent to the 28-morgen land (which Koen perhaps obtained as a reward from the count of Holland for switching sides in the Arkel War). My reason for believing this is because this Jan's daughter married Willem van Gent, who owned the land from 1413, probably on the death of Jan van Herlaar's.

All of the van Herlaars at this time were descendants of three children of Aleid van Herlaar ( d. ~1323) and her husband Gerard van Loon, heer van Ammerzoden. These three children were Dirk, Arnold and Johan (Schots) van Herlaar.

Van Doornmalen says a an interesting thing about Johan (Schots) van Herlaar. First, he indicates that the origin of the nickname Schots is puzzling and states that it's probably a misspelling of Scocs/Coc. This may be true, but in the absence of any indication to the contrary it might actually be exactly what it means and indicate that he had some relationship to Scotland. As I discussed in my first post (9-21-2020), the Swaim/den Hartog line has a Y chromosome DNA match named Tudhope, about whom little is known, but who may have come from Scotland since Tudhope is a Scottish name. Thus, if at some point in time the van Herlaar family had some transactions with Soctland, it is possible that a male family member remained in Scotland and raised a family there. This of course would only be possible if the Swaims/den Hartogs descend from the van Herlaar line, which is possible and might even be likely if it can be shown that one of the male van Herlaars had married a Sweym—most likely a family member of Jan van de Werve of Dirk Visser. This is far from being proven, but provides a framework for a possible Swaim/den Hartog ancestry that could explain the later use of the Swaim surname.

Van Doornmalen also mentions relationships between the van Herlaar family and the Counts of Megen, giving some evidence that they might have intermarried. I haven't studied this enough yet to discuss it clearly, but this is of interest because one branch of the Swaim/den Hartog line used “van Megen” as a surname. 

It's worth noting that the Geni.com tree also shows that one of the great-grandchildren of Willem van Gent and Gerarda van Herlaar, Renier van Asewyn (1505-1555) married Joanna van Broekhuysen. Also, that Vught, the original home of the Herlaar family, was located only about 5 miles from Boxtel and about 16 miles from Oss. I mention these places because the Randerode/Randerath family were lords of Boxtel, and the Broekhuysen/Swalmen family had married into the Randerode/Randerath family; also, the Knobbouts were known as “van Os,” which may mean the Oss in Brabant near the small County of Megen.

Lambert Millinc, Ridder and Rutger Adelissenz., Priest

An Adam Millink was listed among the knights who stood with Arkel during the 1402 siege of Gorinchem. A Dirk Millink was listed among the “Schepenen end burgemeesters van Gorinchem” (M.J. Waale, De Arkelse oorlog, 1401-1412, De Arkelse oorlog (1).pdf ). Lambert Millink is no doubt related to these two, although I haven't determined his exact relationship.

I haven't determined the identity of Rutger Adelissenz, but he was probably a Millink family member.

Dirk Visser van Rotterdam

Visser or Visscher (Fisher) is a common name and without knowing more information it would be difficult to be certain who this person was. However, since Jan Sweyn Dircxsz is named in a leenkamer as the occupant in 1390 of Bulgersteyn in Rotterdam, and since Bulgersteyn had been previously owned by a Dirck Visscher, and since somewhat later some members of the Swaim/den Hartog line owned land adjacent or very near to the lot owned by Dirk Visser, we can surmise that this Dirk Visser was in fact a member of the Bulgersteyn Visschers. He would not have been Dirk Visscher, “Lord of Bulgersteyn,” but may have been the son of his oldest son Floris, who was also named Dirk and was probably born sometime around 1380 (recall that Floris was the brother of Jan Vlaminc, who I believe may be the same person as Jan Sweyn Dircxsz).

Summary of the Neighbors of the 28 Morgen Land met Hofstede in Lang Nieuwland

The properties neighboring this 28 morgen lot of land in Lang Nieuwland were not common farmers but instead were nobles, knights, and Church officials. Furthermore, at least two of the properties were owned by families who were definitely pro-Arkel during the Arkel War, as was the Knobbout family who subsequently owned the land.

Because Willem Ottens and Gerit Ottens both owned land in Lang Nieuwland, and a few of Willem Ottens' offspring owned land that's part of this same 28-morgen lot, we can possibly find Ot, the progenitor of the Swaim/den Hartog families, among one of these neighbors. This is something that needs further research, perhaps particularly among the Herlaar family because it had ties to the Broekhuysen/Swalmen line.

Returning to the property transactions themselves:

                                                                        Lot D                       

Half of 18 morgen (1554: stretching from the Leerbroekse opslag [storage pond?] to the achterdijk, zuid: Adriaan Stalpart; 1600: Arnout Blommaert, oud-burgerneeter van Gorinchem, noord: het manhuis te Gorinchem)

1554 Jan Knobbout van Os Jansz. at the death of Margaretha, daughter of Hendrik Knobbout, his aunt, confirmed by Christina Knobbout, his niece, after which transfer to Adriaan van Megen the old for young Adriaan, son of Gijsbert, daughter of Jan van Dorssem

1571 Adriaan van Megen at Utrecht by death of young Adriaan van Megen, his son.

1573 Willem van Megen at Utrecht on the death of Adriaan, his brother

1585 Mr. Adriaan de Jong of Dordrecht, attorney for the court of Holland, for Adolf Abinga voor Willem Gijsbertsz [van Megen], his nephew, by the death of Willem van Megen

The Adriaan van Megen in the 1571 entry is almost certainly Adriaan Willems, son of Willem Ottens and brother of Jan Zweym Willems. This shows a continuing, inter-generational relationship between the two families. This likely means they'd intermarried, or perhaps that a Knobbout was Ot, the paternal progenitor of the Swaim/den Hartog family.

Adriaan Stalpart was a neighbor of this subdivided lot in 1554 and Arnout Blommaert in 1600. They may be irrelevant for our purposes unless their families had owned this land for a few generations. Adriaan Stalpart was probably Adriaan Stalpaert van der Wiele, son of Vincent Staelpart van der Wiele who was born in the 1500's in Tournai, Hainaut, and died 1577 in Dordrecht, Holland. Arnout Blommaert is said to be an “oud-burgerneeter” of Gorinchem, which is undoubtedly a misspelling of burgomeester, which was the chief magistrate of a town.

Lot G

A camp of 4.5 morgen....

1585: Mr. Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht for Adolf Abinga voor Gerard Gijsbertsz., his nephew, living at Amsterdam, by the death of Willem Adriaansz. van Megen; married to Margaretha, daughter of Pieter van der Berck.

There's no entry indicating how Willem Adriaansz obtained the land. Presumably Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht was his son, but this isn't directly relevant to this inquiry, so I haven't researched it.

I'm not certain what a camp (kamp) was, but probably meant a small dwelling or place to put up a tent rather than farmland. A morgen as a unit of land varied by location from about a 0.5 to 2.5 acres, although I don't know its size in this part of Holland.

Lot H

A 4.5 morgen camp in the 18 morgen weer (1598: named Kruishoeve; 1619: completely adjacent to the south: Digna Jansdr, married to Arnout Blommaert Arnoutsz)

1585: Mr. Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht for Adolf Abinga for Luitge Gijsbertsdr, his niece, by the death of Willem van Megen.

                                                                                Lot H   

A camp of 4.5 morgen....

1585: Mr. Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht for Adolf Abinga voor Gerard Gijsbertsz., his nephew, living at Amsterdam, by the death of Willem Adriaansz. van Megen; married to Margaretha, daughter of Pieter van der Berck.

There's no entry indicating how Willem Adriaansz obtained the land. Presumably Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht was his son, but this isn't directly relevant to this inquiry, so I haven't researched it.

I'm not certain what a camp (kamp) was, but probably meant a small dwelling or place to put up a tent rather than farmland; possibly a vacation home. A morgen as a unit of land varied by location from about a 0.5 to 2.5 acres, although I don't know its size in this part of Holland.

Lot H

A 4.5 morgen camp in the 18 morgen weer (1598: named Kruishoeve; 1619: completely adjacent to the south: Digna Jansdr, married to Arnout Blommaert Arnoutsz)

1585: Mr. Adriaan de Jonge of Dordrecht for Adolf Abinga for Luitge Gijsbertsdr, his niece, by the death of Willem van Megen.

These three entries for van Megen tell us nothing about the original of the family except that their neighbors appear to have been relatively wealthy and appear not to have been local farmers, although of course it's possible that some of the land was leased out to local farmers.

Special Nature of this 28 Morgen Property

The property description of this land ends with a very interesting phrase that appears to set it apart from most other properties: the land is “free from tithes, tribute, tariffs, fees to neighbors, and from which lord Jan van Arkel held the daily court.” If this is an accurate translation, it appears to mean that this land was given a special, exalted status with the property system that existed at the time because it was the place from which Jan van Arkel held his “daily court”--in other words, apparently it was in some sense a center of politics or justice for the Land of Arkel.

In 1413 the land was transferred to Willem van Gent, knight, from Jan van Herlaar van Meerwijk, “who loved lord Jan van Arkel.” Jan van Herlaar is likely the same Jan van Herlaar mentioned earlier as being listed among the knights who were good friends of Willem van Arkel.

The peace treaty ending the Arkel War was signed on July 26, 1412; the above land transfer occurred on November 4, 1413. The war was lost and Jan van Arkel lost almost everything but his life but including his freedom. His son Willem died in 1417 in an attempted to take back Gorinchem by force, but by that time it was a lost cause.

Why did this 28-morgen lot pass from Jan van Herlaar to Willem van Gent, and then in 1451 to Jan Knobbout Hendricksz? All of these men were very pro-Arkel, and perhaps at first they were saving it for a return to power of Jan van Arkel, or perhaps as a memorial to him. Or perhaps they were just being practical, and it was an investment. The real question is why did some of it end up in the hands of the Swain/den Hartog line? They obtained it through the agency of the Knobbout family, but why? Who were Gerit Ottens and Willem Ottens? I feel that in some sense this property and its owners and neighbors are the keys to understanding the origin of the Swaim/den Hartog line. 

                                                        Knobbouts van Os                                                                                                                       

The Knobbout family members were generally called “van Os,” although as shown by the list of “friends of Jan van Arkel,” at least once this was written as “van Asse” (in the list of “Bondgenoten van Jan van Arkel...op 7 december 1406,” p. 249 of Waale, De Arkelse oorlog 1401-1412; although ). It would be interesting to know which was the true “surname.” There's an Oss located about 3 miles south of Megen in Brabant, which is the same small County of Megen that I mentioned earlier. But there's also an Asse located in Flanders, about 35 miles southwest of Antwerp and 10 miles west of Grimbergen, which is located just north of Brussels. In the late 1200's or early 1300's Jan van Grimbergen was the lord of Asse and his paternal grandmother was Elisabeth van Borsselen en Goes; Goes is located on the Zeeland island of Zuid-Beveren, about 12 miles from Waarde which, as we've discussed, might have been the hometown of Amelis uten Weerde. Also, for what it's worth, Dirk Pauw in his Kronijcke des Lants van Arckel (Dirck Franckensz Pauw (Theodericus Pauli). Kronijcke des Lants van Arkel ende der Stede van Gorcum, proefschrift, Amsterdam. (archeologiegorinchem.com) said that Jan van Arkel, the 8^th Lord of Arkel, who died in 1176, had married Sophya van Grimbergen, the daughter of lord Aerents van Grimbergen who would likely also have been lord of Asse. Furthermore, Asse is also located 25 miles east of Zwalm on the Zwalm river, which was possibly pronounced much like “Swaim.”

Gerit Ottens and Willem Ottens in Lang Nieuwland

(In 1623 Thys Barentsen's father, Barend Mathijssen, was living in Nieuwland (Microsoft Word - Swaim_Genealogy.doc (jswaim.com), pp. 223-4).

Gerit Ottens and Willem Ottens in Lang Nieuwland

Other than this 28-morgen property, Gerit Ottens, Willem Ottens, and a few of their children owned property in Lang Nieuwland and nearby. The following information comes from H. den Hertog's “Genealogie van de Familie Hertoch:”

Gherit Otten (son of Ot)

On 5-12-1501 lived in a house and homestead on 8 morgen land in Lang Nieuweland, stretching from the Leerbroekse [storage pond?] to the Achterdijk.

The description of this is exactly the same (thought with reverse directions) in as the following description of a 14-morgen lot of land from a leenkamer entry of 1414:

14 morgen land in Lang Nieuwland, stretching from the achterdijk to the [storage pond] of the Leerbroekse wetering. East: Godeke van Megen en Pieter Heinenz. West: de vrouw van Jan Woutersz. and her children.

1414: Hubert van Zoelen in exchange for numbers 10, 18, 37 and 51, to be released with additional 50 pound. N.B. This deed has been canceled.

So this land in 1414 was to have been traded for four other lots and money, but the trade was canceled.

However, the most interesting point about this land is the neighboring property owned by Godeke van Megen (and Pieter Heinenz). This land must be close to that of the land that Gherit Otten owned in 1501, or may be subdivided from the same land. The van Megen surname was first used by Willem Otten's son Adriaan, who was born around 1475. It cannot be a coincidence that in 1414 Godeke van Megen lived on the same or a nearby lot of land as was later lived on by Willem Otten and no doubt his son Adriaan, who then used the name van Megen.

I think it likely that Godeke van Megen fits somehow into the Swaim/den Hartog family tree, either directly as Ot, the father of Gherit and Willem Otten, or indirectly through a female relative who married Ot or perhaps Ot's wife quite possible or even likely that this Godeke van Megen was either Ot, the father Willem Otten, or perhaps to Gerit Otten (who was married to a daughter of Peter Henricxsz, which leaves open the possibility that they used the surname or quasi-surname “van Megen” (or to a mistress of Gerit Otten so that he was an illegitimate child). It appears to be only Adriaan and his descendants who use the name van Megen, so perhaps his mother was not the daughter of Peter Henricxsz.

Recall that there was also another neighbor called Kunigonde van Deventer, and that Willem Ottens son Claes (and his descendants) used the name van Deventer.

Whereas Willem Ottens son Jan Zweym Willems and his children used the name Sweym.

So perhaps no infidelity of Willem Ottens was involved, but his sons simply borrowed surnames from various relatives—but why would they do this rather than be content using only their patronymic names? And which, if any, of these three names—Sweym, van Deventer, van Megen—was the paternal line name? In other words, which surname was that of Ot, which he'd gotten from his father?

I think it's possible that Godeke van Megen was related to the Knobbouts, but only because the Knobbouts were “van Os” and the town of Oss was located very close to the County of Megen (so close that today the town of Megen is part of the municipality of Oss).

If possible, the exact identity of Godeke van Megen should be determined.

Although there's no evidence that Hubert van Zoelen was related to the Swaim/den Hartog line, he did own land this land near where Willem Ottens later lived, so he's worth looking into more carefully. I haven't done this yet except to note that among those listed as “Knights and [squires?] who stood with Arkel during the siege of Gorinchem in 1402: were:

Jan van Arkel van Zoelen en Avezaath

Arent van Zoelen and brother

So again, we have more nobles who supported Jan van Arkel owning land in Lang Nieuwland. Was Arent van Zoelen's brother Hubert van Zoelen?

Here are the lots of land that Hubert van Zoelen traded (or tried to trade) for the land in Lang Nieuwland:

10

3 morgen land in Rietveld, used by Bertout Bertoutsz

3-7-1407: Hubert van Zoelen for part of 50 English nobels of lord Jan Gardijn, steward of Arkel, from the estate of Jan van Arkel, to be redemmed for 500 nobles.

1414: Hubert van Zoelen, together with other property, transfers to the feudal lord in exchange for numbers 55 and 70

Despite the words “estate of Jan van Arkel,” Jan van Arkel was not dead in 1407. Rather, Count Willem was able to take possession of the Land of Arkel at that time and claimed ownership of all of Arkel's lands, which he then redistributed to those who were loyal to him.

Lot number 55 is this 14 morgen lot in Lang Nieuwand; number 70 will be presented below

18

16 morgen (1413: being a farm), against Arkel on the Hoogland (1413: between the waranden and the Haarweg near the windmill yard)

4-20-1407: Hubert van Zoelen for part of 50 English nobles from the estate of Jan van Arkel, to be released

8-11-1413: Gerard van Herlaar due to the debt of the feudal lord

I'm not certain of the meaning of the 1413 explanation, but now we have Gerard van Herlaar owning this land, just as Koen van Herlaar owned land adjacent to the 28-morgen land discussed above. This is probably the Gerard who was the brother of Koen.

37

2 morgen land in the Beemd in common with the children of Jan Rike

3-7-1407: Hubert van Zoelen for part of 50 English nobles, to be redeemed with 500 nobles

1414: Hubert van Zoelen, together with other property, transfers to the feudal lord in exchange for numbers 55 and 70.

51

10.5 morgen land in Nieuwland in common with Arnout Vink; de run behind the old homestead of Arkel; great 7 morgen, 14 morgen there.

4-20-1407: Hubert van Zoelen from the estate of Jan, lord of Arkel, the first parcel from Gijsbert over the Vecht and the last from Arnout Gezenz., possibly to be resolved

1414: Hubert van Zoelen, together with other property, transfers to the feudal lord in exchange for numbers 55 and 70

This property is described as being behind the Arkel homestead. This lot is probably close to the 28-morgen land discussed above, which was described as the place for Arkel's daily court.

70

11 morgen land in Kwakernaat. Both sides: Wouter Well. North: de Zaling. Southwest: the Boterslootse way.

1414: Hubert van Zoelen in exchange for numbers 10,18,37 and 51, to be released with 500 pounds.

The deed has been canceled.

More than six centuries after this entry, Kwakernaak has persisted as the name of a north-south street in Nieuwland, probably the western boundary of this 11-morgen lot; likewise, the north boundary “de Zaling” is still called Zalingstraat. Boterslootse way appears to have been renamed as Zijlkade, possibly because Nieuwland is now in the province of Utrecht while Botersloot is in South Holland. The town and street of Botersloot was probably named after one of the Hugo Botters who descended from an Arkel; the Botters were lords of Schoonhoven.

Reference for all the above numbered leenkamer entries:

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

Gerit Otten

Gerit Otten and his wife also owned about another 19 morgen of land in Lang Nieuwland, with another house, and this was located next to Jan van Strien's property. Jan van Strien was the treasurer of Gorinchem.

Ot Gerits

By 1516 Gerit Otten and his wife both died and their son Ot Gerits then owned the house in Lang Nieuwland on 8 morgen property.

Joris Gerits

Joris Gerits appears t have received the house and 19 morgen property in Lang Niuewland next to Jan van Strien. He also got 41 more morgen of land land in Lang Nieuwland in the “run” (de geren), stretching from the half middle wetering to the cross ditch, as well as another 1 morgen in Lang Nieuwland.

In 1518 Joris Gerits bougt 12 morgen of land in Lang Nieuwland between the property of Vinck Govertssen/Henrick die Groten, stretching from the middle of the achterdijk.

Otte Geritsdr

Otte got 7.5 morgen of land in Lang Nieuwland

Gheertruyt Gheritsdr

From her first husband Willem Willemsen she inherits 10 morgen of land and half a house in Lang Nulant (1504).

Willem Ottens

This is the earliest defininte ancestor of the Swain/den Hartog line. In 1481 he had a property transaction involving in some way a Jan Knobbout. This land was in Reyerscoop just north of Lang Nieuwland. In 1484 he appears to own and and is living in the leechend of Middelkoop. He probably owned land in Lang Nieuwland also, because his oldest son owned land there.

Ot Willems

In 1506 this oldest son of Willem Ottens owned a half-interest (with somebody named Aernt Willemsen who wasn't a brother) in 12 morgen of land in Lang Nieuwland.

In 1507 Ot sold 11.5 morgen of land in Lang Nieuwland to his brother Adriaen Willemsen (de Backer/den Hartoch/van Megen) Whether or not this was the same land and some Willemsen mentioned in the 1506 transaction appears to be unknown.

Sprong and Spronk Families of the Land of Arkel

In a list of Gorinchem city officials, a Floris Spronk is listed as a schepen (alderman) of Gorinchem for the years 1384, 1386, 1399 and 1401, and in some connection with a “suster huys” in 1421 (a suster huys was apparently a group home for older women).

A Gijsbert Spronk was listed as a Burger of Gorinchem in 1454 (as well as a Jan Jansz Visser, also there's no way to know if these was a Rotterdam Visser).

A Jan Spronk is listed as a schepen in 1473 and 1476.

In the early to mid-1500's, the following Spronks are listed: Dirk Spronk, Dirk Spronk Rutgersz, Jan Rutersz (possibly a Spronk), Cornelis Spronk Dirksz, Rutger Spronk Cornelisz. Abraham Kemps Leven der doorluchtige heeren van Arkel, ende jaar-beschrijving der stad Gorinchem, heerlijkheyd, ende lande van Arkel, onder desselfs heeren, ook onder de graven van Holland, tot den jare 1500 (googleusercontent.com)

This list doesn't necessarily include every Spronk listed in this source, and of course it only includes the Spronks who were involved in Gorinchem politics; there were likely many other Spronks living in and near the Land of Arkel.

There was also a family of Sprongs living in the Land of Arkel that various descendants of Willem Ottens supposedly married into (I haven't verified these relationship). These include Abraham van Deventer (1590-1664), grandson of Willem Claesz Deventer alias Wyntgen van Deventer, who married Maaychen Herbertsdr Sprongh; Willem Claes Deventer (1591-1650) who married Anneke Sprong; Thys Barentsen's grandmother Lijsbeth Barends, whose granddaughter by her second husband, Barbara Huijberts (1630-), married Willem H. Sprong (1620-1659), and another granddaughter by this husband, Maaijke Huijberts (1624-) married Bastiaan Herbertsz Sprong (1615-1668)(another granddaughter, Cornelia Middelkoop (1632-1707) supposedly married a Jan Bogaert and emigrated to the New Netherland colony in 1663 on “de Bonte Koe”).

But whether these Sprongs are descendants a Spronk van de Werve is unknown, at least to me. Spronk and Sprong may be two spellings of the same word, as the -k and -g sound both probably represent the gutteral -ch sound. Sprong is a common Dutch verb meaning spring, as in leap, but in this research I haven't seen it used other than by the Land of Arkel Sprongs and the van de Werve Spronks, and even today it's not a very common Dutch surname (see infra).

I think the van de Werve Spronk-Land of Arkel Sprong connection is a potential clue to the Swaim/den Hartog ancestry and needs to be more carefully examined. Since we know that at east one van de Werve family did live in Lang Nieuwland during the 1400's, and we have evidence that the Rijswijk Sweyms were part of the van de Werve family, it is not difficult to believe that the Sprongs were Spronks (and Sweyms).

Paternal Ancestry

The surname Sweym was used in the Rotterdam-Den Haag area from at least the early 1300's through at least 1503, although it never appears to have been very common there at any time. It was used in Gouda and in Utrecht in the 1400's and also by Jan Zweym Willems of Middelcoop and Utrecht in the late 1400's through the mid-1500's. By the late 1500's the surname seems not to have been used by anyone anywhere until it was apparently revived by Thys Barentsen in Holland in 1660 in a document acknowledging a debt. (Microsoft Word - Swaim_Genealogy.doc (jswaim.com) p. 174). The name as handwritten could be interpreted as either Swijn or Swijm (the difficulties of interpreting old Dutch records is one of the themes of Berend van Dooren's “Ons Voorgeslacht” article “Het Popperiaanse Sweyn). Oddly, though, this seems to be the only time that Thys Barentsen used that surname; both before that in Holland and after than in America he was referred to as some variation of Thys Barentsen. In the early 1700's, however, his children and their descendants began to use some variation of the Swaim surname, probably being pressured by the British to adopt a true surname as the English had long done.

Thus, the Sweym surname was used at some point in every century from the 1300's, although it seems to have been used only sporadically after the three generations it was used by Gijsbert>Gheret>Gijsbert of Rijswijk.

Today the surname is virtually extinct in Holland, as the following chart indicates. This chart shows the number of individuals in the Netherlands in 2007 using various surnames. I've included all likely variations of the surname as well a few other relevant surnames. (Database of Surnames in the Netherlands (cbgfamilienamen.nl)

Netherlands 2007

Name                  # w/ Surname

Sweym                       0            

Zweym                      0

Zueme                     0

Zwijn                      0

Zweynen                  0

Sweynen                  0

Zwijnen                  78

Swijnen                      0

Swaim                    0

Swain                      <5

Swaen                     168

Swaan                  267

Zwaan                  3.541

den Hartog             5,722

Den Hartog                  11

Hartog                     3,484

Hartogh                          49

den Hartogh                  411

Den Hartogh                  <5

den Hartigh                   412

Den Hartigh                   <5

den Hartoch                     0

den Hertog                    2,156

Den Hertog                       <5

Hertog                             572

Hertogh                           345

Deventer                           80

van Deventer                  807

Van Deventer                   <5

van de Werve                        13

Van de Werve                       <5

van der Werve                    175

van de/r Werven                     0

Ruijgrok                            977

Ruygrok                              51    

Ruychrock                             0

Ruigrok van de Werve        81

Ruigrok van der Werve      38

Spronk                           1,457

Spronck                            440

Spronk van de Werve           0

Spronc                                  0

Sprong                             680

van Megen                      968

Van Megen                       <5

van Meghen                       0

Visser                        49,525

de Visser                     4,976

De Visser                         15

Visscher                      6,715

Visker                            384

Bokel                              20

Beukel                            <5

Boekel                          536

van Foreest                    30

de Foreest                        0

Bolle                           574

Boll                             371

Bol                           3,199

van Mathenesse              0

van Matenesse                0

van Teilingen              413

van Teylingen               84

van Wassenaer             34

Wassenaer                     5

Brederode                 244

van Brederode          251

Knobbout                 182

van Os                  6,886

Van Os                        6

van Oss                   704

Van Oss                      7

The names “Swaen,” “Swaan,” and “Zwaan” are probably genealogically and etymologically unrelated to “Sweym” but rather derive from the word for “Swan.” Thus, today there are probably less than a hundred individuals in the Netherlands using any variation of the name that I've seen, and it's likely that most of those are not related to either the Sweyms of Rijswijk or to the Swaims in America. Almost all of these names are “Zwijnen,” which means swine or boars, and it's far from certain that this is etymologically relatd to “Sweym.”

Now here's a chart from the 2010 United States census regarding the Swaim and similar and related surnames:

                                                          Number of Individuals With Surname

United States 2010

Surname        Number 

Swain           25,157 

Swaim            5,310 

Swim             1,713 

Swims                717 

DenHartog       623 

Swimm             361 

Swem             301 

Sweem           146 

den Hartog        0

denHertog         0

den Hertog        0

Deventer           0

This chart shows that there are about five times as many people in the USA with the surname Swain compared to the surname Swaim. The surname Swain is English in origin and, of course, the surname Swaim derives probably exclusively from descendants of Thys Barentsen. Probably a few hundred with the surname Swain (my family included) are actually descendants of Thys Barentsen, but these are a minority, and most descendants retained the terminal -m sound rather than the -n.

There are apparently only DenHartogs in America, and this is likely because for whatever reason very few den Hartogs or den Hertogs immigrated to America in the 1600's, and who would have spelled it with a separation between the “den” and the root surname. The 623 DenHartogs are likely all descendants of those den Hartogs who immigrated to America in the mid-1800's as part of the Schulte migration that settled mostly in Pella, Iowa. Most of these are probably descendants of Willem Ottens; it's a certainty that some of them are, as one of them matches the Swaim Y-DNA pattern closely enough as to be indistinguishable from the Swaims. Apparently it's more common for Flemish Belgians to spell their “van” or “den” surname prefix without a space separating the van/den from the root surname (and with the “van” or “den” capitalized); this spelling is also found frequently in Americans with Dutch surnames.

As a side note that may be of interest to some, it appears that at least one family of den Hartogs may have emigrated to New Netherland in the 1600's; here's a 1691 marriage record for a Barbara Hartoch:

Ultimate Origin of Sweym

In my opinion the surname probably derived from one of four potential ultimate sources: swijn, swan, Zwalm, or Swalmen. The first two are animals that had symbolic meanings, the last two are places that a person might have come from or otherwise had some connection to.

I'm hardly an expert on Dutch surnames, but the majority were clearly derived from a place rather than an animal. In looking through hundreds of leenkamers, of animal names I only recall (spelled in various ways) Nachtegaal, Zwijn, Leeuw, Valk, Arend, Zwaan, Vogel, Haan, Vos, and maybe Kat (van Cats) and Wolf. The name Visser/Visscher also ultimately derives from an animal, but is unique in that it specifically means a person who kills that animal for food; most of the other animals were used because they were perceived to have particular virtues such as strength, beauty or intelligence. Of course I may have missed a few animal names that I didn't realize were such, but in any event there are only a limited number of animals that a person would want to be associated with (few would want the name Stinkdier), whereas there were tens of thousands of villages, towns, regions, bodies of water, and so on that a person might be associated with.

For at least a couple decades in America it's been speculated that Swaim derived from the word for the bird Swan, and this seems reasonable because swans are usually described as haing the virtues of beauty and elegance, and as I've seen from the leenkamers medieval Dutch nobles appeared to have an obsession with swans and swan ponds, spending much money on them. Swans were also specifically associated with the house of Arkel and were on the Arkel coat of arms, and people living in the Land of Arkel, as the Swaim ancestors did, would certainly have known this. Thus, a surname derived from the word for swan might have had added meaning in the Land of Arkel by associating those with that with the Arkel family.

I personally doubt that the name Sweym/Swaim derived from swan, mostly because the terminal -m sound of the surname appears to persist through the generations, and even when in the old records it's spelled with a terminal -n it's possible that this is just a misreading of the handwriting of the record; this was one of the themes of Berend van Dooren's “Ons Voorgeslacht” article “Het Popperiaanse Sweyn.”

For this same reason, I doubt that the surname derived from swijn, although this is probably more likely than that it derived from zwaan. I've previously written about a hypothesis put forth by someone in a Dutch genealogical forum that the name derived from the Jan Zweym Willems' association with van Brederode, who supposedly had a flag with a boar on it (although the Brederode coat of arms actually has a rampant lion rather than a boar). The van de Werve coat of arms has not only one but two boars on it, so the the name Zwijnen (plural for boars) would be particularly appropriate. In various online genealogies Jan Zweym Willems is often spelled Zwijnen, and the Utrecht Jan is spelled Zwijn, so this is perhaps possible. However, Since the surname is sometimes written as Zwijnen, perhaps this is the true derivation of the name. However, the leenkamer transcribers much more often spell the name Zweym or Sweym, and once Zueme, and these leenkamer documents are older than the later documents and thus closer to the source of the name; furthermore, Berent van Dooren determined that it's more likely meant to be spelled Sweym than any other way.

Thus, I have my doubts that the name was derived from either zwaan or zwijn, which leaves its most likely derivation from a place by a similar name. I've identified what I believe are the two most likely sources for the name, both of which are located on rivers of the same name. That they're located on rivers isn't surprising because the word zwalm and swalmen mean swallow or engulf, an action characteristic of flooding rivers, especially in the days before various flood control engineering measures were used to control rivers. These two places are Zwalm in Flanders (today's Belgium) and Swalmen in Limburg at the confluence of the Swalm and Maas rivers.

Zwalm

In researching the Rijswijk/Bulgersteyn Sweym line I've noted a definite connection to Flanders, the primary one being the van de Werve family. There's also the the name Jan Vlamic. Also, in Ing. H. den Hertog's “Genealogie van de Familie Hertoch” there's a reference to Antwerp regarding Jan Zweym Willems, although I haven't studied this yet. In My Heritage I have three true Belgian DNA matches with well-developed family treee. The ancestors of one of these appear to be mostly from Bruges, the ancestors of another from around the Roermond-Masstricht (the DNA match lives in Belgium but many ancestors are from across the border in today's Netherlands). The ancestors of the third have two areas of concentration: one just to the east of Antwerp and one located about 20 miles west of Zwalm:

None of this match's ancestors actually lived in Zwalm, however. On the other hand, this match has van de Werve ancestors, so given the leenkamer connections between the Sweyms and van de Werves, so it probably did come through Thys Barentsen rather than from some other New Netherland ancestor (which, however, doesn't necessarily mean that it came from my infinitely paternal line).

Swalmen

Based on the totality of the documentary and DNA evidence, I think there's a stronger link between the Swaim line and Limburg than there is with the Swaim line and Belgium. Although I've previously provided this screenshot of some of the locations of ancestors of the Belgian DNA match that I just mentioned above, here it is again:

Obviously this match has several ancestors who lived very close to Swalmen.

I also have a handful of matches with German/Dutch ancestors who lived in the region of Heinsberg and Monchengladbach, which are also close to Swalmen and are relevant for the hypothesis regarding the Broekhuizen family that I'm about to present, since some of their ancestors were lords of Heinsberg.

I've written previously that in the Limburgs dialect of Dutch the town of Swalmen is pronounced very much like “Swaim,” and that on older maps it was also spelled much like it was locally pronounced: Zuamme, Suamme, Zwame (and recall that in one leenkamer the name was spelled Zueme).

Swalmen originally came to my attention when looking into one of my 10^th great-grandfathers, Gerrit Hendricksen from Zwolle, and his son Barent Gerritsen. Gerrit Hendricksen emigrated to New Netherland on the same ship as Thys Barentsen, and it's likely that Gerrit Hendricksen's son and wife were also on that ship, although the ship's records often listed only the head of a family rather than each member of a family. What was particularly interesting about this family was the surname from the Ancestry.com crowd-source family tree that that someone had given to Barent Gerritsen: “Swaim van der Swalme.” No source was given for this name, but we know for a certainty that the family did use the surname “van de Swalme” because that name is found in the Dutch Reformed Church marriage records for the year 1686 in Bergen, New Jersey:

    Entry #159 shows the marriage of Reynier Josiassen van Roen to Constantina van de Swalme

Constantina was the daughter of Barent Gerritsen, who must have also used the “van de Swalme” surname, but who later began using “van Flaesbeeck” (a son may have started using “Revesteyn,” which is perhaps another clue as to the family's origin, although this needs further research. There's an area of Monster called Ravesteyn and there's a Ravestein in North Brabant adjacent to Megen; either of these locations might be relevant).

Since the word Swalme was pronounced (at least in Limburg) very much like Swaim, this means that aboard De St. Jan Baptist were in fact two families of Swaims. This is unlikely to be a coincidence, and probably indicates that Thys Barentsen and the van der Swalme family had planned to emigrate together (although once in New Netherland they didn't live particularly closely together; Thys Barentsen's family lived on Staten Island and the van der Swalme family in Brooklyn).

July 4 2022 Note: Barent Gerrits van der Swalme had apparently lived in Zwolle before he emigrated to America, where he went by the name of Barent Gerrits Vlasbeek/Flaesbeek. Vlasbeek is the name of a short stream in the town of Epe, which like Zwolle is in Overijssel. Since van der Swalme used Vlasbeek as a surname, the family must have some connection with Epe. Epe is 14 miles from Deventer, so this is a connection to Deventer that might help explain the use of the surname Deventer by the Swaim/den Hartog line in the Netherlands. 

September 24 2022 note: The source of the Vlasbeek actually appears to be in the village of Tongeren east of Epe. There is a larger, older, and more historically important city called Tongeren in the Belgian part of Limburg; this Tongeren is only 11 miles from Oupeye and 16 miles from Oost (today's Oost-Maarland). As I discussed in my two most recent posts on Otto Gerritsz van Oist, Oost is the first known homeof the van Oist family, and Oupeye was the town the wife (Felicite) of this first van Oist came from. If, as I believe likely, Otto Gerritsz van Oist was Ot, the father of Willem Ottens, then it may be more than coincidence that a "van de Swalme" may have lived in Tongeren, Gelderland, while his family originated near Tongeren, Limburg. It's possible that the Gelderland Tongeren was named after the Limburg Tongeren when a member of the van Oist/Swalmen family moved from Limburg to Gelderland. Tongeren in Gelderland is located only 15 miles from Deventer in Overijssel, so this might also explain the surname Deventer used in the Swaim/den Hartog lineage. Of course it's possible that there's no connection at all between the two Tongerens, but it's worth further investigation. 

The identity of "Kunigonde, 's-dekensdocther van Deventer," who owned a parcel adjacent to that owned by Adriaan van Megen in Lang Nieuwland, should also be investigated for any possible relationship to Barent Gerrits van de Swalme/Flaesbeek.

Broekhuizen van Swalmen Hypothesis

The following genealogical information comes mostly from the Geni.com crowd-source tree and I haven't verified any of it, so its accuracy is unknown. However, one advantage of crowd-source trees is that they do contain a lot of information that serve as clues, even if the clues are unsourced. Furthermore, much of the information in these trees is in fact well-researched, although any given bit of information needs to be verified if no adequate source is provided. Given this caveat, here's the hypothesis:

There was a knight called Seger van Broeckhuysen bij Arcen, Lord of Broeckhuysen (born about 1175). Broeckhuysen is located on the Maas river north of Venlo. Seger married a daughter of Dietrich, Graf of Ahr and Hochstade and Luitgard von Dachsburg, both from ancient German noble families. Their son was Johan I Van Broeckhuysen (b. 1195) who married Jutta Praet von Randerode von Randerath. The Randerath side was from Boxtel, Brabant, and Jutta's mother's side was Beatrix von Kleve, a daughter of Count Arnold IV (II) von Kleve and Adelheid von Heinsberg-Valkenburg.

The children of Johan van Broeckhuysen and Jutta Praet incuded Willem I van Broeckhuysen (1240-), Seger II van Broeckhuysen, Heer van Swalmen, and Giselbertum van Broeckhuysen van Swalmen bij Arcen. The descendants of Willem van Broeckhuysen and Seger II van Broeckhuysen, Heer van Swalmen are known, but apparently nothing is known about the fate of Giselbertum van Broeckhuysen, who would have been born possibly in the 1240's.

If this Giselbertum had moved to the Rotterdam-Den Haag area and perhaps married a van de Werve, he could perhaps be the father of the first Gijsbert Sweym of Rijswijk that we've previously looked at. The source of the Sweym name would then simply be from his own name of Broeckhuysen van Swalmen. This is admittedly nothing more than speculation at this point but is at least a hypothetical framework for explaining the origin of the Swaym name.

It's also interesting to note that there's a town called Boekel between Boxtel and Broekhuizen, although if the Boekel in Rotterdam was truly a van de Werve, this Brabant Boekel would merely be a coincidence.

Here's a screenshot from the family tree one of my DNA matches:

Here we see a Broekhuizen and also a Bol. Bol was listed as having been born in Valkenburg in Holland, which is located a bit west of Leiden and about 6 miles north of both Wassenaer Castle and Duivenvoorde Castle. Bol is of interest because we saw from the Vlaardingen "de Tempel" leenkamer that a van de Werve who was presumably a Sweym descendant married a Bol, and thus Bols may carry "Sweym" DNA. No location was given for Maartje Broekhuizen, but Broekhuizen is a unique name that at this time would probably not have been used by someone not entitled to use it by being a family member.

Broekhuizens also lived in Amersfoort and were high-ranking church members. Also, a Randerath was briefly a Prince-Bishop of Utrecht (1249-1250).

Here's a speculative genealogy based on this hypothesis:

I'm not suggesting this is a true genealogy; at this point it's only a thought experiment that might never be provable through documentary evidence, although it could definitely be proven or disproven with Y-DNA matching along with sufficient genealogical documentation. 

Who was Ot, the Progenitor of the Swaim/den Hartog line?

The brief answer to this question is that we don't know his identity. He's just a name and even then, probably only by reference to his two son's patronymic names. All we know about Ot is his reflection from his sons and grandsons. These sons and grandsons owned land, two were burghers of Utrecht, and one appears to have worked for a Brederode in shipping and was wealthy. This means that Ot must have been relatively wealthy or married someone wealthy; he couldn't have been a simple farmer unless simple farmers in Holland at this time owned large amounts of land, which is something I doubt very much.

But other than this fuzzy reflection, Ot appears to be a mystery.

My guess is that Ot was a van de Werve, and specifically a Spronk van de Werve, which may be a line that descended from the youngest Gijsbert Sweym. Alternatively, he might have called himelf Viss(ch)er and descended from Jan Sweyn Dircxsz of Bulgersteyn (and we know a Visser from Rotterdam owned land in Lang Nieuwland). Regardless of the name he used, I think he was probably a paternal descendant of the Sweym line from Rijswijk/Bulgersteyn. This line seems particularly prone to changing surnames often, so it would be no surprise that various descendants of Ot would be called Zweym, Swaim, Hertog, Hartog, Deventer, van Megen, and so on.

However, this is only a guess, and it isn't even necessarily true that he was paternally a Sweym. Ot's grandson Jan Zweym used the name Sweym surname, as did his 4x great-grandson Thys Barentsen, but they could have borrowed that surname from Ot's wife rather than Ot himself. In other words, it could have been Ot's wife who was a van de Werve/Sweym rather than Ot.

This leaves room to believe that Ot was Otto van Arkel, the bastard son of Jan V van Arkel, but we still have no proof of that.

It does seem odd that nothing is known about Ot. If Ot was wealthy his name should show up on either property records or other records, and very possibly does but isn't recognized for who he was in relation to his Swaim/den Hartog descendants. Or, if Ot was just a peasant farmer who owned no land, then it needs to be explained how his sons and grandsons obtained their land and wealth.

I suspect that Ot was either trying to live quietly in the wake of the destruction of the House of Arkel, for which he had probably fought, or that he or his children were bastards of someone whose wife wouldn't tolerate him or them living with her family (or who didn't want to be bothered by children and left them to his wife and disappeared). Either of these would explain why we know nothing about him. But again, this is just a guess.

Here are the men named Otto who had some connection to the Land of Arkel around the year 1400:

Otto, van Polanan heer van Asperen

Otto van Heukelum

Otto van Arkel (bastard)

Otto van Arkel (Jan V's father, died 1396)

Otto van der Poorte (1406 “friend” of Jan Arkel)

Otto van Polanen is an interesting possibility because he was probably related in some way to Amelis uten Weerde because their coats of arms were very similar, and Amelis uten Weerds was in some way connected with Gijsbert (I) Sweym. Otto van Polanen was a son of Dirk van Polanen who was a brother of Philips van Polanen.

There was apparently another Otto van Polanen, Heer van Hedel and Almsteen, son of Jan II van Polanen, who lived at the same time, born in 1372 and married to Sophia van den Bergh. 

It's possible that Ot was one of these Ottos, but I'm not going to dive down into that rabbit hole right now.

There may also have been any number of Ots/Ottos whose names weren't recorded because they'd owned no property. 

Knobbout van Os, heer van Otteland

As I mentioned earlier, the Knobbouts were called “van Os” or “van Asse.” Abraham Kemp says the Knobbouts were the lords of Otteland (heeren van Otteland); presumably  Otteland is today's Ottoland, which is a village south of Nieuwport, Schoonhoven and Bergambacht on the Lek, about 12 miles west of Leerdam. A Henrik Knobbout Claesz was listed as a schepen of Gorinchem in 1329, so the family may have lived in the area for many generations. As we've seen, various members of the Knobbout family were close to at least some of the descendants of Willem Ottens, which was presumably through intermarriage. We could speculate that a Knobbout was the true identity of Ot, and that the name “Ot” came from the fact that the Knobbouts were the lords of Otteland, rather than because any of them had the first name Otto. This would explain the relationship between the two families, and perhaps also why some of Willem Otten's descendants took the name “van Megen,” because Oss was a town located next to Megen (if this is the “Os” referred to in “van Os”).

According to Abraham Kemp, Jan van Arkel's house in Gorinchem (Hoff van Arkel, standing west of the Kerkhof, on Krijtstraat), was lived in by the "Knobbouten van Os, Heeren van Otteland" after Jan van Arkel lost the Arkel War--although by 1643 it was occupied by a “Capiteyn Jonkker Willem de Viry.” The Knobbouts of course also owned the 28-morgen land used by Arkel as his daily court, so there's no doubt the Knobbouts were very close to Jan van Arkel.

Hendrik Knobbout 1636

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39-40 (1984-1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN TE MATENESSE EN SCHIEDAM, 1200-1622 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 39 (1984), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie

REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTAD WEDENA, 1282-1605 door C. Hoek Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 40 (1985), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie 

An interesting connection that needs to be further investigated appears in the previously in a Hofstede Arkel leenkamer entry from 1363 (REPERTORIUM OP DE LENEN VAN DE HOFSTEDE ARKEL IN HET LAND VAN ARKEL, 1263-1650 ). This entry are about land owned by the Knobbout family: 3.5 morgen land behind Arkel on he Acterdijk. I don't understand the connection of the first entry to the rest of the entries, but that isn't important for us here. Here's the entry (translated):

Hendrik Knobbout, lad; mentioned as witness 1363, Familie Matenesse, charter.

The actual entry appears to be in some document from the Matenesse family rather than from a leenkamer, although I'm not certain about this. Regardless, this entry clearly indicates that there was some connection between the Matenesse family and at least this one particular Knobbout. This is meaningful to use because at least at this time the Matenesse family was the Bokel family. A 1327 leenkamer entry from the Ambacht van Matenesse states that Dieric van Matenesse was the son of Dieric Bokel. Another leenkamer entry from the Hofstad Wedena states that “de hofstad te Mattenesse” in 1435 was named “Diederic Boekels hofstad Uyternesse.”

As we've seen, the Bokel family had intermarried with the Visscher/Visser family, and in 1370 Jacob Bokel had given property to Gijsbert (II) Sweym which Gijsbert Sweym then donated to the Church.

And Hendrik Knobbout in 1363 was somehow involved with the Matenesse family. So this is a potential connection between the Rijswijk Swaim family and the Knobbout family in 1363, long before anyone from the Sweym family lived in the Land of Arkel (as far as we know).

It would be interesting to know whether this Hendrik Knobbout was living in the Rotterdam-Schiedam area at the time he was mentioned as a witness, but I don't know whether the document this entry was taken from would tell us that.

Autosomal DNA Evidence

All of my ancestors from the Netherlands immigrated to New Netherland in America in the 1600's, so the most recent common ancestor I have with any match from the Netherlands will have been born before about 1650, which was about 12 generations ago. On MyHeritage.com I have more than 80 DNA matches who live in the Netherlands and a few more who live in Belgium, so it's clear that identifiable segments of autosomal DNA do survive for this long or I would have no DNA matches at all from the Netherlands and Belgium.

Any autosomal DNA surviving as identifiable segments from this many generations ago will be small segments that randomly survived the recombination process at each generation and that come from random ancestors. I will have DNA from only a few of the three or four dozen of my direct ancestors who immigrated to New Netherland, and they in turn will have had only a random selection of DNA from their ancestors of previous generations. In other words, the chance that I would have DNA from any of the families that I've identified in this post as potential Swaim ancestors is not particularly high. The DNA from the roughly 90 DNA matches from the Netherlands and Belgium may come from 90 different ancestors or from only one of them, but most likely came from a handful or two.

The concept of how to identify the common ancestor of an autosomal DNA match is simple: you compare your family tree to the match's family tree to identify a common ancestor. However, in practice this is not possible with most matches because the match either doesn't have a well-developed family tree or the family tree is private and inaccessible on the MyHeritage website. This problem is of course magnified the further back in time the common ancestor lived, since few family trees extend back into the 1600's because documentary evidence from this far back is sparse to nonexistent for most ancestors. Of the roughly 90 DNA matches from the Netherlands and Belgium, only about 30 have trees that are both accessible and extensive enough to be useful at all.

Still, a few of these DNA matches do have family trees that have individuals in them who are possibly related to the people that I've identified in this post as possible Swaim ancestors, with surnames such as van de Werve, Visser and van Os. I have few DNA matches with extensive ancestry in the Land of Arkel, which might mean that by chance I didn't receive much or any “Land of Arkel” DNA, but also might occur if the Sweym line hadn't lived for more than a few generations in the land of Arkel, and if some or all of the women they'd married hadn't come from the Land of Arkel.

The fact that a particular person can be found in both my family tree and the family tree of a DNA match from the Netherlands doesn't necessarily mean that he was in fact our common DNA ancestor, but of course it greatly increases that likelihood. Thus, the fact that I have three DNA matches from the Netherlands and Belgium with a van de Werve in their family trees does in fact mean that I'm likely to have had van de Werve ancestors. This is less true with a match for a surname such as Visser because that's a very common surname; but if that Visser is from somewhere near Rotterdam he would more likely be a true ancestor than, say a Visser from Friesland or Groningen.

Van de Werve

Here's a screenshot of a person in the family tree of a Netherlands DNA match with whom I share 2 segments of DNA:

The tree of this DNA match has no one else whom I can identify as an ancestor or collateral relative of my New Netherland ancestors; however, it's always possible that this DNA actually comes through a Dutch ancestor other than Thys Barensen and that this van de Werve is in this tree coincidentally.

However, I do have another Netherlands DNA match who shows on the website's search feature as having a van de Werve in his family tree, but whose tree is private and therefore inaccessible. This second DNA match with a van de Werve in his tree increases the likelihood that the van de Werve line is a true ancestor for me.

A third DNA match has van de Werves in his family tree, this one being from Belgium:

The van de Werve line originated in and around Antwerp and its main line remained in Belgium; according to Batavia Illustrata the Dutch van de Werve line is a line of the Belgian van de Werve ine. The Jan van de Werve in this tree married to Katline van Wijneghem is the same Jan vande Werve (ridder, born in 1389) and his wife Clara van Wijnegem who are listed in the “Werve” entry of Batavia Illustrata, and Jan's son Claus and wife Catharina van Wilre are the same as the Claas and his wife Catharina van Wilre listed there. The Antwerp van de Werve family was a powerful family of nobles centered in the Antwerp area, and Batavia Illustrata indicates that the Dutch van de Werve family is a branch of the Antwerp line.

There's no one else in this tree that I recognize as an ancestor, and my Belgian ancestry is sparse both genealogically in DNA matches. Other than this match I have a Belgian match with almost all Limburg ancestry, and this match should be considered Limburgish rather than either Belgian or Netherlands. I also have a third match with mostly Belgian ancestry who originates in and around Brugge, but I have no idea who our common ancestor might be. In other words, I have very little Belgian ancestry, and thus the van de Werve is the most likely common ancestor. 

I also have three matches from America who descend from a van der Werven who immigrated to America via Brazil:

Altogether this seems like a pretty strong van de Werve DNA signature for an ancestor from this far back in time. The surname is also unique enough that it's likely that all the van de Werves in Holland were part of the same family.

Visser/Visscher

Unlike van de Werve, Visser is a common surname in the Netherlands and many unrelated families have the surname. I have 9 DNA matches from the Netherlands and one from South Africa with a Visser in their family tree. Two of these are actually surnamed Visser. The family of of these matches comes from Ridderkerk, one from Hillegom, one from Doesburg and one from Arnhem. Another married a Marijgje Jacobsdr Hartog (father Jacob Aertsz Hartogh b. 1661 Barendrecht):

Bol

I have 3 DNA matches with the surname Bol in their trees, including the one who is herself surnamed Bol although this is her adopted name and she has no known Bol ancestors (although she does come from Wateringen and Naaldwijk, which is near where the Bol/Bolle family that married into the van de Werve family lived).

van Os

I have two DNA matches with a van Os in their family trees. I have no idea whether or not these van Os families are related to the Knobbout van Os family; this requires further research.

This van Os married a Bol! 

van der Does 

I have a few DNA matches on Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com with Foreests in their family trees, but I won't show them because I'm not certain how accurate these genealogies are, and some of them might be confused with a different “de Forest” family from Avesnes.

The Foreest in the tree of one of my Ancestry.com matches, however, was born in Voorburg in the mid-1600's. Voorburg is about 3 miles from Rijswijk, so this may be a true descendant of the van Foreest family. Interestingly, this Foreest is married to a man with the surname van Sprang, so it's also possible he's a Spronc van de Werve. However, it's more likely that I'm related to this DNA match through her den Hartog ancestor, who immigrated to America from Leerbroek in the mid-1800's. I would show some of this family tree but the DNA match set it as private and although I have access to it, I wouldn't show it without her express permission.

I have a DNA match with the surname van der Does, and through the geni.com crowd-source family tree and the Ambacht Foreest leenkamer I can almost connect the DNA match van der Does with Clementia van Foreest. The connection is broken at both ends, although it's clear that this connection is very likely.

This DNA connection has only a stub of a family tree, and the tree is also private, but there's enough information to reasonably conclude that this DNA match's paternal grandfather had the unique surname van der Does de Willebois:

This is actually enough information to proceed with, because this combined surname is likely to be unique to descedants of the couple that it came from, who were the husband and wife Petrus Josephus de Willebois (1768-1834) and Adriana Cornelia Maria van der Does (1778-1823). The Geni tree shows several descendants of this couple living into the middle 1900's, and this DNA match, who was born in 2001, no doubt is descended from one of them. Although I wasn't able to make a definite connection between the leenkamer's Maria van der Does (mentioned in 1579) and the Geni.com tree for van der Does, it is likely that Maria van der Does was closely related to the van der Does from the Geni.com tree, which originally came from Delft.

I'll start from the other end of the relationship pathway (Willem van Foreest, grandfather of Clementia van Foreest, wife of Gijsbert (I) Sweym) and connect him (tentatively) to my DNA match through this Willebois-van der Does couple. Each successive relationship is parent-sibling, and m. means mentioned in a leenkamer (REPERTORIUM OP DE GRAFELIJKE LENEN IN RIJNLAND, 1222-1650 door J.C. Kort Eerder gepubliceerd in ‘Ons Voorgeslacht’, jrg. 42-45 (1987-1990), een uitgave van de Zuidhollandse Vereniging voor Genealogie)entry when date of birth is uncertain:

Willem van Foreest (m. 1278)

Jan van Foreest (d. 1348)

Herbaren van Foreest (m. 1348)

Jan van Foreest (m. 1367+, wife Ida van Oosterwijk)

Herbaren van Foreest (m. 1413)

Ursula van Foreest (1480-1525. husband Jacob van Borsele)

Nikolaas van Borsele (m. 1540, wife Elisabeth van der Does)

Maria van Borsele (1522-, husband Adriaan van der Does)

Maria van der Does (m. 1579, husband Jan van Gelmen)

(break in tree: assumed reationship, not necessariy parent-child)

Simon van der Does (1507, Delft)

Sem Simonsz van der Does (1546, Harlingen, wife Mechteld Vinck)

Johan Simonsz van der Does (1567, Gorinchem)

Hendrik Johansz van der Does (1615, Gorinchem)

Johan van der Does (1645 Amsterdam)

Johan Hendrik van der Does (1672)

Willem van der Does (1706 Leiden, Heer van Vught en Cromvoirt)

Johan Hendrik van der Does (1741)

Adriana Cornelia Maria van der Does (1778, husband Petrus Josephus de Willebois)

(assumed relationship of DNA match to the descendants of the above couple whose descendants thereafter use the surname van der Does de Willebois)

Clearly there are problems with this tree. It assumes that the van der Does who married van Foreest is closely related to the same family as the van der Does de Willebois family, and that the DNA match is a descendant of the marriage between the van der Does and Willebois couple. However, both of these assumptions are reasonable, so although this relationship path isn't proven, it is definitely plausible.

Assuming that this pathway is true, then the most recent common ancestor of DNA match van der Does and the Swaim/den Hartog line was Gijsbert (I) Sweym or his unknown wife.

There is a problem, however. I share only one short segment of DNA with van der Does, and we have 58 DNA matches in common who also share that DNA segment. Most of these matches have Finnish names, with a few Swedish (who almost certainly have some Finnish ancestry. I have a good deal of Swedish ancestry and some Finnish ancestry through Swedish "Forest Finns." According to MyHeritage van der Does has no Finnish DNA but about 20% Scandinavian DNA. Such estimates are only very generally reliable and are often wildly wrong, The Geni.com family tree doesn't show any obvious recent Scandinavian or Finnish ancestry in the van der Does Willebois line, but it wouldn't show the most recent ancestry for DNA match van der Does (his MyHeritage stub of a tree shows his mother's surname as being Tijsma, which I assume is probably Frisian).

So what does this mean? At first I was going to write off this DNA match as a freak coincidence in which the van der Does DNA match and I were related through some unknown Finnish/Scandinavian ancestor through my mother's line rather than through a Dutch ancestor through my father's line. But upon further reflection, I came to believe this isn't true. This is because none of the triangulated matches had more than 12 cM of matching DNA, which is a signature of a distant rather than relatively recent common ancestor. With more recent DNA some of the 58 DNA matches would have longer sections than this, with more variability, which isn't the case here. Rather, this pattern implies that the Most Common Recent Ancestor probably lived several hundreds of years ago, maybe hundreds of years before Gijsbert (I) Sweym had been born. This would mean that DNA match van der Does, the Finnish/Scandinavian DNA matches, and I all share a common ancestor who was born perhaps a thousand or more years ago. 

Therefore, I believe that this DNA segment that I share with the van der Does match does in fact probably come through a common ancestor who lived somewhere in the area today called the Netherlands (and that this ancestor would have ancestors who came from Denmark or Sweden, who also had descendants who moved to Finland). Given that van der Does and I have a plausible hypothetical family tree connecting us to a common ancestor—Gijsbert (I) Sweym or his wife—it is probable that that Most Recent Common Ancestor was in fact Gijsbert (I) Sweym, or his wife.

This would imply that the Swaim/den Hartog line did descend from the Rijswijk Sweym line. They hypothetical family tree and the DNA evidence are both too uncertain to be considered proof of this relationship, but I consider it to be strong evidence. It's always possible that I'm related to van der Does through DNA from some Dutch ancestor other than the Swaim paternal line, but as there is a line of van der Does who descended from the Foreest ambacht line, the most parsimonious explanation is that this DNA does come through the Swaim/Sweym line.

However, there is yet one other possible source of this DNA segment: it's possible that it came from the van Aefferen/Aefferden line when Pauline Johanna Josephine Maria van der Does de Willebois (b. 1893) married a man named Charles Arsene Hubert Merle van Aefferden (1890-1974). The father of this van Aefferden was born in Hooglede, Flanders, and his father and grandfather were both born in Roermond, Limburg, with no further location information available. Roermond is located about 60 km up the Maas from the city of Afferden, so Charles Arsene Hubert Merle van Aefferden might very well have come from the same family as did Margriet Corneisdr van Aefferen, the wife of Claes Willems Ottens van Deventer, who is the Most Common Recent Ancestor of the Swaim and den Hartog lines. Thus, if these two van Aeffer(d)ens were from the same family and if my DNA match van der Does descends from this van der Does de Willebois-van Aefferden match, then it's possible that this DNA segment came through Charles Arsene Hubert Merle van Aefferden. However, normally the descendants of this match would be named after the father and therefore be called Van Aefferden rather than van der Does de Willebois, although of course some descendants might have chosen instead to be named van der Does de Willebois if they thought that name was more socially prestigious.

So we would first have to disprove that DNA match van der Does descends from Pauline Johanna van der Does de Willebois and Charles van Aefferden before we could be relatively certain that the matching DNA came from Gijsbert (I) Sweym or his wife.

Here's a screenshot showing the section of DNA in common between van der Does and me:

If other Swaims and den Hartogs would test their autosomal DNA and upload it to MyHeritage.com it might be possible to prove this DNA segment comes through this paternal line.

I want to point out a few more interesting things about the van der Does family tree. First, one member of that line, Johan Simonsz van der Does, was born in Gorinchem in 1567, and his son Hendrik Johansz was born in Gorinchem in 1615.

Second, Maria van der Does, who was definitely part of the van der Does family from Geni.com, was married to a Nikolaas Stalpart van der Wiele. Recall that in 1554 Adriaan Stalpart owned a property in the 28 morgen Lang Nieuwland lot that was adjacent to that owned by Jan Knobbout van Os and which was to go to Adriaan van Megen, which it did in 1571. Dates are not given for Nikolaas Stalpart van der Wiele who was married to Maria van der Does, but it would have been about this time.

Third, Sem Simonsz van der Does (1546-1614) married Mechteld Vinck. Supposedly Sem Simonsz had been born and died in Harlingen, Friesland, but his son and grandson were born and died in Gorinchem.

So we actually have a number of potential interactions of the Swaim/den Hartog family with the van der Does family.

January 31, 2022 Note

A van der Does also pops up in connection with the subdivided lot D from the Arkel 28-morgen property (Microsoft Word - 1984-196Arkel-Land van Arkel.doc (hogenda.nl). The ownership history of this sub-lot is:

Before 1495

Hendrik Knobbout the old

Hendrik Knobbout van Oss the young (son of Hendrik the old)

1495

Bertrada, daughter of Hendrik Knobbout the old and sister of Hendrik Knobbout van Os the young.

1503

Jan Knobbout Jansz, son of Bertrada

Between 1503 and 1554

Margaretha, daughter of Hendrik Knobbout

1554

Jan Knobbout van Os Jansz. by the death of his aunt Margaretha, and Christina Knobbout his niece

Adriaan van Megen, son of Adriaan van Megen the old (Adriaan van Megen the old purchased the property for his son)

(The leenkamer entry seems to be saying that Adriaan van Megen the old was the son of Gijsbert. The entry also appears to be saying that Christina Knobbout was the daughter of Jan van Dorssem)

1571

Adriaan van Megen te Utrecht (the old) by the death of his son Adriaan van Megen the young

1573

Willem van Megen te Utrecht by the death of his brother Adriaan (the old)

1585

Willem Gijsbertsz van Megen by the death of Willem van Megen

(Since Willem Gijsbertsz van Megen inherited the property from Willem van Megen, clearly they're related, so Gijsbert van Megen, the father of Willem Gijsbertz, must have been the son of either Willem van Megen or his brother Adriaan (who were both sons of Adriaan Willems van Megen, the son of Willem Ottens, the son of Ot))

1600

Maarten van Aalst Antonsz by transfer from Willem Gijsbertsz van Megen

(Arnout Blommaert Arnoutsz obtained the land for his nephew Maarten van Aalst. There's not indication whether or not there's any family relationship between the van Megens and Maarten van Aalst)

1617

Anna van Aalst by the death of her brother Maarten

(Willem Hubertsz van Muyen was the husband of Anna van Aalst)

1626

Hubertus van Muyen, the son of Anna van Aalst

(However, the name of Hubertus doesn't appear until the following 1641 entry; Hubertus' grandmother managed the property between 1626 and 1641)

1641

(Simon van der Does is mentioned as the uncle of Hubertus van Muyen. This means that Simon van der Does was the brother of either Willem Hubertsz van Muyen or of Anna van Aalst)

This Simon van der Does is likely a member of the same family that Ursula van Foreest's son Nikolaas van Borsele married into in 1540 (if the Geni.com tree is correct).

Also, according to the Geni.com tree some of the van der Does in the 1500's were living in Gorinchem. Most of the earlier generations had lived in Delft, the Hague, and in that area. Also, some of these earlier van Does had married some interesting people:

Elisabeth Adriaensdr van der Does married Jan Ruychrock van der Werve

Dirk van der Does (1405-146) married Liesbeth Adriaensdr van Mathenesse (-1469)

Dirk van der Does was the grandfather of the above Elisabeth Adrieansdr van der Does.

Liesbeth Adriansdr van Mathenesse's great-grandfather was Jan Vlaming (Jan Vlaming had married Elisabeth van den Berg).

I'm not drawing any conclusions from any of this information, but rather just pointing out potential avenues for further research.

Van der Does and Van Couwenhoven

I should also point out another issue that I recently discovered.

Because I have a male DNA relative whose surname is van der Does, we obviously had a common ancestor in the past. However, even though it is credible that this common ancestor was Gijsbert Sweym or his wife, it's also possible that the common ancestor was from a line other than my paternal Swaim line.

The Geni.com relationship pathway shows that I'm related to the above-mentioned Elisabeth Adriaensdr van der Does through a line other than my paternal line (which is still set by the moderators as Jan van Arkel). Rather, it is through a New Netherland immigrant 11^th great-grandfather named Wolfert Geretse van Couwenhoven (1579-1662):

However, the earlier Netherlands part of this lineage (which was automatically established by the Geni.com system) is uncertain. I haven't spent much time investigating this lineage and I have no opinion on the accuracy of this part of the Geni.com tree. I included it here only to point out that my DNA relationship with the van der Does match could come from a non-Swaim ancestor.

However, there's also the possibility that the common ancestor of the Swaim and ver der Does lines is a common ancestor of both the Couwenhoven and Sweym lines (although the one particular DNA segent could have come through only one). This is because, as I pointed out above, at least one van der Does married a van de Werve, and another married a descendant of Jan Vlaming, and it is possible that this van de Werve and/or Jan Vlaming was a Sweym or descended from a Sweym.

Future Direction in DNA Matching

The identity of the Swaim/den Hartog paternal ancestry could probably be established if enough Swaims from American, DenHartogs from America, and den Hartogs/Hertogs from the Netherlands tested their DNA either through MyHeritage.com )or transferred it to MyHeritage.com from another DNA testing company) and then posted their matches in detail to some web location available to all extended family members. I prefer MyHeritage other platforms for European DNA matching because My Heritage allows sorting of matches by country of residence of the match and because it has a chromosome browser that allows for the actual matching of chromosome segments. While Ancestry.com has a larger family tree and better interface for that tree, it has fewer European users and doesn't have a chromosome browser. A potential alternative is the Geni.com platform, which also allows for group projects such as the South African group project that I mentioned a previous post.

However, the type of DNA testing with the most potential for identifying the Swaim/den Hartog paternal ancestry is Y-chromosome DNA testing with Familytreedna.com. However, I've already tested my own Y DNA on that site to the highest level currently available, and therefore there isn't much reason for any other Swaim/den Hartog to test their Y DNA because it will be essentially the same as mine. We're now essentially waiting for other matches to show up that will provide more clues as to the identity of the Swaim/den Hartog Y DNA. The most useful action that a Swaim or den Hartog could take with regard to Y DNA is to encourage anyone with a surname found in this post test their Y DNA on Familytreedna.com (or with one of the few other companies that test Y-DNA, and then transfer it to Yfull.com, where my Y-DNA can also be found).