SAKE KRUIS AND HIS ANCESTORS

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English summary

Introduction
This website tells the history of our Kruis-family. The Dutch author Geert Mak showed in his novel ‘My father’s century ’ how your own family and personal history is connected with the big history and events that are told at school and history books. That’s the aim of our website too.
One has to be aware that probably there are more than one Kruis-families.  Independent of each other in the past there should be more than one who started to use the name of Kruis.

Kruis in Giethoorn
We know from our grandfather that his roots laid in the province of Friesland but after research we now know that we have to go back to the village of Giethoorn, a famous village – like the rural counterpart of Venice – in the central part of the Netherlands. Around 1575 there was a man Wycher Wychers (the second name is called a ‘patroniem’ and is related to the father’s name so you can read Wycher son of Wycher) who was going to use the name Kruis.  The name Kruis means ‘Cross’ and you can think about a religious sign or a crossing or some form in the landscape that it might refer to and which was an identification of the people who lived there.
The Kruis-family belonged to a specific religious group, the Mennonites, who were persecuted because the denied the governmental rules.  The environment of Giethoorn was very fitting for such of groups because it was very remote, inaccessible and a hiding-place for people. Moreover there was hard work to do in the moors.  And that is exactly what the Kruis-family did; most of them were working in turf removing on a large scale. A lot of lakes are nowadays the result and the memory of that ‘energy-industry’.

Gietersen in Friesland
But in the mid of the 18th century the area was more and more exhausted and people looked for other possibilities. The 6th generation according to our ancestor’s line there was a man Gerrit Wychers Kruis, born in 1742, who realized these problems and together with several other people of Giethoorn (later called the ‘Gietersen’) he moved to a new land use in Friesland nearby the Tjeuker-lake. First he was going to live in a very small village Rotsterhaule but after a few years a moved again to the south of the lake to the village of Oosterzee.  Gerrit was a clever man because he married Lammechien Muurling; she was a daughter of and former inhabitant of Giethoorn who was one of the first who had left and had become a wealthy man. He was one of the ‘landlords’ with a lot of land for turfmaking.  Gerrit followed his father-in-law to Oosterzee, too.  After some years he was integrated in the new society to such a level that he changed religion. In stead of Mennonite he was going to belong to the mainstream Christian church, the Reformed Church.

The 'nijsgjirrich man yn Dunega’
His eldest son – of course Wycher Gerrits – was an ambitious man but obstinate too. He started an own land-use project at the west-side of the Tjeuker-lake.  Nobody had done so before because of the strong resistance of the regional rural mayor. Moreover Wycher had to face an enormous flood in 1825 that ruined the area for some time. So it wasn’t a success and when Wycher died in 1830 his wife and residual children went back to Oosterzee.

Beerent and Jan:  mid 19th century
Wycher’s son Beerent and later on his grandson Jan were facing a troublesome time of declining turf-production and at the end of the 19e century agricultural crises, social agitation (uprise of socialist party particularly at workmen in the moors). It was a poor existence, hard work if there was work and a lot of uncertainty. Some of their sisters or daughters married more wealthy men and could develop themselves more. At the end of the 19th century a lot of people emigrated to the USA or Canada including members of the Kruis-family. But not Jan although he could have done it. Particularly Jan looked after other work than turfmaking – even for a short time he went to sea – and he was lucky to find his second wife being a merchant. Jan moves from the village Oosterzee to the small town of Lemmer.

Sake born in Lemmer
In Lemmer Jan and his wife Janke had a complex family: 2 sons of Jan’s first marriage, some children of Janke’s first husband (not of Janke herself), and the children of Janke and Jan. One of the last is Sake Kruis, our grandfather, born in Lemmer in 1880. He told us stories about Lemmer (learning skating and so on), was proud of his Frisian origin (he liked to talk in Frisian language)  but he too didn’t tell us some things we now wonder about.  For example about the relationship withh is half-brother Rinke?  Or why the family moved to Tynaarlo where Sake together with his father Jan were going to work at the sand extraction (economic reasons we suppose), or his relationship with other people of the Kruis-familly in the surroundings like his niece Magdalena who lived in Lemmer until 1963!

Sake married in Tynaarlo
Moving to Tynaarlo – nearby the town of Assen – is another connection between family history and big history. Our family is part of the great shift from agriculture and turf-industry to employment in infrastructuur (roads, canals, railways) and merchandise.
Living in Tynaarlo Sake’s sister Geesje got married with Albert Minnema, son of a railway worker. Thanks to his sister Sake became acquainted with Albert’s sister Aafke; they married in 1907. Sake’s relationship with the Minnema’s was better than with his own family, especially his father and his brother Wieger.  When Wieger moved from Tynaarlo to Rotterdam, his father Jan and his mother Janke moved with him. Wieger was a carpenter and started a building company.  But Wieger died in 1927 without great results; his father Jan died some years later in 1933.

Sake civil servant in Epe
Previously Sake was looking for other work and that’s why he was moving to Epe in 1914 (at the start of the First World War, an very uncertain period). He got a job as roadworker at the local municipality. But after his disease – the notorious Spanish fever – he had to change his job and became employee at the local administration with several functions.
In the meantime Aafke’s father had moved to Epe in 1921 where he lived with Aafke and Sake. It was a busy and sometimes troublesome household: two naughty boys Jan and Folkert, a strong girl Janke, three younger children who took care (Mijndert, Meentje and Geesje) and grandfather Folkert.
But grandfather Folkert died in 1938 and years before Jan and Folkert left home.  Right before the start of World War II the family move to another house in Epe at Brinklaan 31; the house is there even nowadays and on our family meeting in 2010 we have visited it again.
After Aafke’s death in 1961 Sake got to live in at Mijndert’s family nearby in the same street.
But a year later they had to leave the house and were moving to Apeldoorn and Sake was going with them.  In 1967 Sake was struck by tuberculoses and he died in a hospital in Harderwijk.
His children now have also been died, last of them Janke recently in 2010. They belonged to the 11th generation of Wycher Wycher Kruis from Giethoorn.