It’s always nice to conduct genealogy research of our own family, especially when there is no family tree to look at. I’m one of these people who are curious to know the history of their own family. Maybe we could find something interesting.
My nuclear family unfortunately, doesn’t keep family tree. My maternal grandmother come from dutch family de Wilde, while her husband came from Manado, with family surname Yap.
In other side, my paternal grandfather is a hokkien chinese came from fujian province, with surname Sie.
My paternal family is bigger than my maternal counterpart. It’s BIG enough to give me headache remembering who is who during marriage party.
I’m currently listing all my family members into one big family tree since my paternal family lost its lost original tree (which was written in mandarin kanji). My paternal grandfather passed away in 2005,and I wasn’t really close to him since he was living in Makassar.
I enjoy with this diversity though, my family consists of mixed heritages, Chinese, Dutch, Taiwanese, Makassarese, Javanese, and just recently my cousin married a Japanese. Makassarese people speaks really loud btw, I think they are rivalling Batak people, or maybe louder.
This post is just a miscellaneous story of my life, trying to fill unanswered questions of my family history.
From the maternal side, my family has surname of de Wilde, My great-great grandfather Laurens de Wilde married a chinese woman Tan Anggoer (Tan is a very common chinese surname in Indonesia). De Wilde family itself, apparently a very-very common dutch name. I don’t even know where, or when he was born or what’s his parents’ name.
I once told by my granny that Laurens was expelled from de Wilde family because he married to a chinese woman (racism happened everywhere, I guess). I currently don’t know whether Laurens de Wilde has siblings or not, there are no documents present at my disposal.
Laurens de Wilde and Tan Anggoer has son, named Gustaaf Adolf de Wilde, he’s my granny’s father. Born in Tegal, 1879. He married a javanese woman named Soetirah (without surname), who was born in 1896. Information of my javanese great-grandmother is very obscure, there is no information where she was born or what is her parents’ name. Her death certificate doesn’t give much help either.
My grandmother didn’t say anything about her since Soetirah died 1939, my grandmother, Suze de Wilde was born 1932, her mother died when she’s seven, I guess that explains it.
I also don’t know much about my great-grandfather, Gustaaf de Wilde, all I know is, he’s working as typist as domestic affair ministry, he might be employed as civil service, but I’m not really sure.
My great grandfather has 6 children, including my grandmother (who passed away in 2005). The eldest one currently living in Netherlands, while the rest is scattered in Indonesia. Luckily my mother is still in contact with her cousin, so we haven’t lost in touch.
I will move to Jakarta by the end of month, while we are preparing to get rid of unused old stuff, I found some documents of my ancestors… written in dutch. Unfortunately nobody in my family speak dutch, my granny didn’t inherit the language to us, which is unforunate, though my mother’s sister does, fluently.
My mother speaks random dutch words a lot when talking to her siblings, but it’s not good enough to translate the documents.
Fortunately I have family in netherlands, they are also very interested to investigate our family tree, hopefully they could get something from the old documents.
[...] is continuation of my previous post. You don’t really need to read it since I wrote this for purpose of archive. Someday I will [...]