As a retired history buff and a great admirer of the work Cousin Dave Jordan has done with the van der Kloot Family history taking us back to the end of the 18th Century with Adrianus’ birth in 1798, I have endeavored to trace our heritage back into the Dutch “Golden Age’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Several years ago while driving from Amsterdam to Belgium, my wife, Mim, and I stopped at the town of Middleharnis, the 1820s birthplace of Adrianus’ children, Marinus and Matthijs van der Kloot. After a few false starts, we eventually arrived at the efficient Gemeente Middleharnis whose staff provided copies of not only the brothers’ birth certificates, but of their father’s birth certificate, wedding license and military record, along with their grandmother, Adriaantje Jagt’s, death certificate.

We were told, however, the family roots lie in Oud Vossemeer (Old Lake Voss) 20 miles to the south on the Island of Tholen, not in Middleharnis or Texel. We were off to Oud Vossemeer, a rural farming village of 3,000, thirty miles north of the Belgian border and the city of Antwerp and forty miles south of Rotterdam. It is not mentioned in most Dutch tourist guides; one has to seek it out in the countryside.

The 17th-18th Century town of Oud Vossemeer surrounds the village green, its highest point, an elevation of three feet. A stately yellow brick cathedral featuring a lofty spire occupies the center of the green, dominating the village and countryside; the stately town hall dedicated in 1771 sits across a cobblestone street. On one side of the cathedral stands a modest contemporary monument completed in 1982 dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The inscription in front of the monument in Dutch and English is from FDR’s “Four Freedoms” presidential inauguration speech of January 6, 1941. The four freedoms as listed on the stone monument are for freedom of speech and worship and from want and fear.

As we discovered only recently, the monument was not to honor FDR as a wartime liberator, but to mark Oud Vossemeer as the ancestral home of the Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt family. In the mid 1640’s Claes Martensen van Roosevelt immigrated from Oud Vossemeer to New Amsterdam, then a tiny Dutch settlement at the foot of Manhattan Island. A Roosevelt house and museum are under development in Oud Vossemeer.

Unlike the Roosevelts, we have been able unable to trace our heritage back to the 17th century. We do know, however, that at least three generations of van der Kloots lived in Oud Vossemeer during the 18th century. The earliest identifiable relative is Marinus, my fourth great grandfather, born in 1710, married Martijntje Labans in 1743 and died in Oud Vossemeer in 1787. Although we know Martijntje was born in 1722 to Leunis Labans and Jacomijntje Lucas, we have no further records of Marinus’ parentage. As tradesmen working as smiths and carpenters in the rural farming areas of Zeeland, it does not appear the van der Kloots fully participated in the Netherlands’s “Golden Age” of prosperity.

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Fred Vanderkloot is the grandson of Cornelius van der Kloot and Gertrude Kaan.

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Initial Web Publication Date: 02/05/2005
Intermediate Additions: 02/05/2005