The Van Baalen family
Amsterdam to America
For years, the story we told about our name was a simple one: Van Baalen means “from Balen,” a small town in Belgium, and the double A in the spelling supposedly marked the Jewish branch of the family off from a Protestant one. It’s a tidy story. It’s just not the one the records tell.Over the past several months, we’ve been digging into Dutch civil records, Amsterdam marriage and death registers, U.S. probate files, and American death certificates to trace our direct paternal line as far back as the paper trail allows. What we’ve found is more interesting than the legend, and we’re still finding more.
Where the line actually starts
Our earliest confirmed ancestor is Emanuel Joseph van Baalen (1755–1809), who lived in Amsterdam. His son, Israel Emanuel van Baalen (born around 1788, died 1849 in Noordwijk), married Sara Hartog, and their son Hartog “Henry” van Baalen (born 30 September 1811 in Amsterdam) is where the story turns toward America.
Henry married Klaartje “Clara” Speijer in Amsterdam in 1836. The two of them raised a family on the Houtgracht, in the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, before making the decision in 1857 to leave for the United States. They crossed on a ship called the William and Jane and eventually settled in Detroit, where Henry worked as a clothier and Clara kept house. Henry died in 1870; his probate file, still preserved in the Wayne County archives, is one of the richest records we’ve found, naming eight children and laying out exactly how the estate passed down.
One of those children, Israel, is our direct line. Israel died young, before his father, leaving two children, Clara and Phillip (born 2 December 1868 in Detroit), who were raised into the next generation. Phillip eventually settled in Peru, Indiana, where he worked as a grocer until his death in 1935, and it’s through Phillip that the family put down roots in Indiana, generations before our little family existed.
From there the line runs through Dewald Van Baalen and Daisy Reeser, to Richard Van Baalen Sr. and Emily Reynolds, to Pete and Ruth, and now to Eric.
A family that crossed an ocean and a century
What the records make clear is that ours is a Dutch Jewish Amsterdam family, documented back to the mid-1700s, that crossed the Atlantic in 1857 in search of something better and found its way, a few generations later, to Indiana. The old story about a double-A spelling separating Jewish and Protestant branches doesn’t show up anywhere in the primary records; what does show up is a family that adapted, resettled, and kept going.
This is a living research project
We’re not done. A few open questions we’re still chasing:
- Confirming Sara Hartog’s parents through pre-1811 Amsterdam marriage records, a research goal for an upcoming Amsterdam trip
- Locating a primary marriage record for Israel and his wife, Malinda “Matilda” Rosenstock
- Tracking down the fate of Henry and Clara’s granddaughter, also named Clara, after her 1883 marriage in Michigan
If you’re a Van Baalen, or married into the family, and you’ve got old photos, letters, or stories passed down that might help fill in these gaps, we’d genuinely love to hear from you. Get in touch — every family has pieces of the puzzle that the archives alone can’t provide.