Jan Willem Lomans
Jan “John” Willem Lomans was born on Jan 23, 1793 in Winterswijk, Netherlands and died in 1885 in Alto, Wisconsin, USA. He was the second child born to Jan Aalbert Lomans and Aaltjen te Siepe.
Children of the Meddo
Jan Willem Lomans, Circa 1885 | Courtesy Mary Shinsel
During Winterswijk’s winter of 1793, Jan Aalbert Lomans and Aaltjen te Siepe had their second child, a boy, that they named Jan Willem Lomans (1793-1885). He became the first generation in the Loomans family’s multi-century history to leave the Netherlands and journey to a new world. Four days after his birth, Jan Willem was baptized in Jacobskerk that sat on the Market Square in the heart of Winterswijk.
Two years before in the autumn of 1791, Jan Aalbert and Aaltjen gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Catharina, who passed after only a few months. The occurrence was painfully common in eighteenth century Europe, as was in many parts of the world before modern medicinal methods were introduced that mitigated the spread of infections for newborns.
Between 1795 and 1815, the couple had eight additional children, two of which passed before reaching their first birthday. Over their lifetimes, Jan Willem and his siblings would fan out across the Gelderland and the United States to raise their own families, creating stakes in places far removed from the farmlands that their forbearers once occupied.
More specifically, Loomans heritage that threads from Jan Aalbert and Aaltjen can be found in:
Wisconsin, USA: Jan Willem and his family settled in Alto in the mid-1840s after arriving in the United States, while his oldest sister, Anna Catharina (1795-1874) and her family immigrated to Allouez, just south of Green Bay in Brown County.
Clymer, New York, USA: Two other siblings including Garrijt Jan (1798-1877) and Janna Berndina (1812-1877) brought their families in the 1840s to Clymer, New York where their descendants have remained for generations.
Gelderland, NE: Jan Willem’s younger siblings Gesina (1804-1834) and Jan Aalbert (1807-1862) remained in Winterswijk, while Janna Geertruid (1810-1871) moved to the nearby town of Aalten, less than 10 miles from the original family farm.
The age difference between Jan Willem, the oldest, and his youngest sibling Janna Berndina is nearly 20 years, a span of time that was not out of ordinary for the period.
In the era that preceded Jan Willem’s birth at the end of the eighteenth century, it was largely inconceivable to think that one day his entire family would uproot their lives and emigrate to a new uncharted world (the year of Jan Willem’s birth, in fact, George Washington was President of the United States).
He would wait another 50 years—the length of a lifetime for many—before he would leave the Netherlands and kickstart a dramatic chain of events that led to more than a thousand descendants some 200 years later.
A View Into Nineteenth Century Life
While Jan Willem’s mother Aaltjen was responsible for keeping the home in order, his father tended the farm and its many exhausting activities. Once the children were of a reasonable age (younger than ten in most cases) they were put to work for the homestead: tending crops, raising and slaughtering animals, and maintaining the home which included tasks such as knitting clothes, preparing meals, and taking care of one’s other siblings.
By nearly all accounts life in the early 1800s was unforgiving. The family worked until dark and woke at dawn, every day no matter the time of year. Sunday was almost exclusively reserved for church and other religious or community activities.
Living in a relatively rural area of Western Europe also meant Jan Willem and his family received few benefits that other cities had to offer, including medicines and whale oil or kerosene for the lamps to light their home after dark.
Women were generally expected to have a dozen or more children, a third of which would die before reaching adolescence due to diseases and other exacting living conditions that are especially threatening to newborns and toddlers. In most cases, women had little choice about their future—their path was generally to marry an older man, have his children, and maintain the home, an incredibly submissive role in society that ultimately did not change much until the Women’s Rights movements of a century later.
Most people bathed once a week if they were lucky enough to own a bathtub; otherwise they used a pail of water and a rag to wipe down. Forget about the use of shampoo, toothpaste, or mouthwash. Hygiene was an afterthought.
Many children wore hand-me-down clothes, and even Jan Aalbert and Aaltjen likely only had two outfits each: one for church and the other for working during the week. Women learned how to knit and sew from a young age so that they could stitch and re-stitch and re-stitch clothing as their families grew.
Their home was likely small by anyone’s standards today, featuring a bedroom and another open space where nearly everything else happened (spinning, weaving, cooking, sharpening tools, relaxing, etc.). The children generally piled onto a single mattress that was homemade with ropes tied across it as a makeshift box spring and straw or cornhusks stuffed inside a thick piece of cloth to provide at least some, albeit minimal, comfort.
Because food supply was based on what could be grown or killed, drought and flood often had devastating effects on families (a significant string of unfortunate weather events occurred in the Gelderland in the 1830s and 1840s, undoubtedly affecting Jan Willem and his children).
Education remained relatively unpopular until the late nineteenth century, with the responsibility for teaching children to read and write falling on parents (if they even knew how to do so themselves).
“[Jan Willem] likely received little education and may have been left illiterate his entire life... common for many low income immigrants in the nineteenth century.”
Because modern medicine was to yet be invented, diseases and any number of farm-related injuries could easily be anyone’s death sentence. Polio, measles, mumps, chicken pox, small pox, influenza, diphtheria, tetanus, typhoid, whooping cough, trench mouth, milk fever, goiters, warts, and worms were just some of the afflictions on the populations of Western Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century (not including others such as arthritis, heart attacks, diabetes, etc.).
Injuries on the farm occurred often (being dragged by horses was a common incident until the mid-twentieth century). These accidents alone underscored the importance of at least one person in the house knowing how to sew up cuts and use alcohol to wash out wounds.
Marriage & Building a Family
Jan Willem was the last of the Lomans surname, the final chapter in the Loomans family’s Winterswijk epic. His children would all experience their adulthood more than four thousand miles from the original homestead in the Meddo. They would rear well over one thousand descendants and chart their own paths in the frontiers of America.
On September 11, 1818, a 25-year-old Jan Willem Lomans married the 19-year-old Willemina Oonk, another native of Winterswijk who was born on January 16, 1799. Their first child was a stillborn daughter, born January 8, 1820. Before the end of the year, they welcomed a son Abraham, who died at 13 days old on December 23, 1820.
The tragic loss of two children in a year only intensified when they lost another son on September 6, 1822 at the age of 10 months (this son’s name is also recorded as Abraham). This experience underscores the harsh realities and high infant mortality of the early nineteenth century and earlier.
Jan Willem and Willemina continued trying for a child, and by the autumn of 1823, Willemina gave birth to Aleida Berendina Lomans. A few years later the couple welcomed another Abraham, this one born on January 6, 1826. Over the next several years, the family added Johanna Geertruid (born April 14, 1827), Jan Albert (born May 27, 1829), a set of twins in Janna Gezina and Johanna Willemina (born September 4, 1833), and Jan Hendrick (born July 16, 1837).
All of the children would accompany their parents to the United States in the mid-1840s.
For the most part, however, the children of Jan Willem and Willemina experienced their childhood in Winterswijk, carrying with them the memories of the motherland all their lives, even as the reminiscence of a life gone by slowly faded away. The family’s journey to the United States would become a defining moment for the generation, and usher in a period of unprecedented expansion of the surname in the family’s new home.
LEARN MORE:
A Glimpse at Simple Homesteading Life in the 1800s by Countryside Magazine: Link Here