How The Dutch Got Their Funny Names

Not so funny actually... Joke is a female form of 'Joe' and 'Broek' is the Dutch word for a wet or swampy field, related to the English word 'brook'. So a translation like 'Joe from the Mudlands' would be more accurate.

I'm sorry to spoil the joke but "broek" in this context means swampy area.

We have a friend in Abbotsford, B.C., Canada, who loves to tell the story of his first grade or kindergarten teacher in Friesland, the Netherlands. Somewhere in the story, he proudly refers to her as Mevrouw Hoogenboezem, which elicits giggles from the female guests and guffaws from the males.

E TAK, in Russian, and so, changing the subject from the mundane and bawdy, to what brought me to this site: I would like help in finding out something more about the origins of the name Haverhals. I was told a very interesting story, not the one on your site which I have been told over and over again, told my teachers of Dutch history to school children in the Netherlands for centuries, and passed on to the third and who knows how many generations of descendants of Dutch immigrants to North America, as to their Napoleonic Era origins and the Dutch making a joke of it all, which turned of them, for who really wants to be called 'Pissed' or 'Naked Born'? And I have met some of these people at college in Michigan when I was studying at Calvin, and who of us were not (born naked)?!!

The story teller was 3rd or 4th cousin Haverhals relative still living in the ancestral village of the Haverhals clans (Sprang, Nord Brabant, Nederland). The major segment by far of this clan descended from a couple born around 1870 now are living in the American Midwest. From other distant relatives of this couple there are many other Haverhals families, not tons, but many who don't even know of one another's existence, I am discovering, living in other places in the Netherlands, North America and around the world also. I will not tell you this Haverhals gentelman's take on the origins of the name. It is somewhat ennobling, and therefore, with a suspicious sleuth's mind, I am a bit wary as to accepting it and its possible implications historically. I never knew whether to believe him or not.

Recently the Sprang relatives have discovered information in Hervormd Kerk archives with a list of names going back to approximately 1620 with the continuing use of the name Haverhals from generation to generation after that. So, the name predated the Napoleonic officials', around 1800 or shortly thereafter, trying to keep better records for his new 'Franco-Roman Empire' of sorts, an earlier attempt at a Third Reich, not recognized as such by Hitler because he would not even consider honouring the French, whom he hated, as having been capable of even making such an attempt and being successful, until Napoleon's unsuccessful attempt to take Russia too, resulting in his humiliating Winter Retreat in 1812 from Moscow and the East. The Haverhals name change took place when the church building was taken from the Roman Catholics; since then the building has remained property of the Reformed, this year or last year, its congregation having celebrated 400 years of continued existence as a Gemeente/congregation of the 'Elect.' :) Before that the names given as parents and ancestors of the Haverhals line were Mieuws and Mieuwz. I tell my brothers that that was the customary manner of naming at that time, a variation of Abram Janzoon (Janz.), then Jan Abramzoon (Abramz.), then Abram Janzoon (Janz.), and on and on, and so on, until Napoleon ended it for all those who had not for one reason or another ended the practice because they had wealth, education, land, or aristocratic title and estates or larger territories at their command and so had taken surnames when the opportunity arose for them to do so.

The puzzle there is that the list only uses the one first name and the variant form with the 'z' which stands for 'zoon,' meaning 'son' and so, son of Mieuws. I never paid attention to the email sent by a brother from the relatives in Sprang if the two M names that predated the taking of the name Haverhals between 1600 and 1620 as to whether the names are always alternating, every other one being Mieuws and Mieuwzoon. My main concern is not with this matter, however, but with why the last Mieuws or Mieuwzoon would have decided in this early decade of the Reformed congregation's occupation of the old Catholic church still standing in the village to have chosen this name, Haverhals.

What is its significance? Both the significance of having taken a surname so much earlier and in the two words, Haver and Hals and brought together as one name? Does it have to do with being grain farmers? horses who do especially well on a diet of oats? Does it have to do with the possible fact that they were in the employ of some local lord in the late 16th and early 17th century?

This was the case with a more recent relative at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century who was the bailiff for the Graf/Lord of Waalwijk, for whom the VanderHoeven father of my great-grandmother Haverhals. However, he was NOT a Haverhals. Another point that keeps being brought up by the Sprang relatives is that people of similar class and wealth in the villages usually married one another. Thus, my great-grandfather's parents would have had to have been considered to have been equals in status to the graf's bailiff, whose large home is one of the few historical monuments and preserved buildings in the village of Sprang Capella, located near the entrance to the long strip of the three Capella villages.

According to A. Haverhals, the Lord of Waalwijk would visit my Great-Great-Grandfather VanderHoeven every day but Sunday for afternoon tea and then business in his best room, the Voorkammer, or in the landscaped gardens around the house; they were close friends, she maintained. She is a member of the local historical society; doing research for the Capella communities has been one of her passions. Annie H. is still living a short block from the large stone Hervormde kerk in Sprang. So, enough for now.

Where can we find out more about a name like 'oats neck,' for which we have been teased ever since we were children in both the U.S. and Canada?!! Help!

A "boezem" is a canal into which excess water was and is pumped, sometimes the boezem is higher than the land from which the water is pumped: hence: Hoogeboezem