Catharina Jahn (1733-1763)

Catharina Jahn or Jaan (dutch link) was baptized on 20 Dec 1733 in Amsterdam, 284 years ago. She is my husband’s 5th great-grandmother. She was the second child of five, two girls, three boys, and the only one to leave progeny.

Both her parents were immigrants to Amsterdam: her father from Oosterwijk (but I don’t know yet which one, there are at least three places with that name in the Netherlands, and one in Belgium), her mother came from Bremen. They were Evangelical Lutherans, and the family stayed with that religion for centuries. Her father and her brother were master farriers.

Catharina first married Eldert Volkamp, a master baker, who was born in Amsterdam, but whose father came from Ezens in East Frisia, Germany. After his death in 1757, after not quite 4 years of marriage, and three children (Johanna, Jan and Margaretha), she married Anthony Coenraad Linsen who came from Geerden in Hanover, with whom she had two more children, of whom only one survived into adulthood. Of her three children by her first husband, none survived: when her father died in 1771, he is only survived by one minor grandchild.

Her sister Angenita died in childbirth in 1752, her first brother died as a child, of the second on nothing is known aside from his baptism, and her youngest brother does marry, but his one child died at age 3 in 1778, and he does not seem to have had any others; his wife died in 1782 without children, and he in 1791

To me, two things stand out in her story: the amount of loss that was part of life in those days, and the amount of immigration into Amsterdam. Economic reasons were probably behind both, even for craftsmen like farriers and bakers.