Wordless Wednesday

It's Wordless Wednesday - a tradition among the Geneabloggers. So here is a look at the part of Zeeland when the Koole family left:


And here is how it looks today, from Google Maps:


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And here are some pictures of the area when my daughter and I visited 2 years ago:

Back to the Cole family

Levi Cole, the father of my grandmother, was born in Kent County, Michigan in 1854, about a year and a half after his parents arrived in the United States. He died in 1904 at the age of 49. As the first son, in the Dutch custom, he is named for his father's father.
In 1876 Levi married Kate Snyder. She had been born in the Netherlands and came to the United States with her parents and two older brothers in 1856 when she is just 3 months old. Two other Snijder children had died in the Netherlands before the family left for America. Kate lived to be 76 years old. in 1932. She died after being stricken with what was most likely a stroke the night the house next to hers caught fire. The story I heard (about 65 years later) was that she was taken to daughter Grace's house nearby where she later died.


Tona Cole was born Thona van Beek in Nieuwerkerk, Zeeland, Netherlands in 1829. She died in 1919 in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan. She married Lieven Koole in Zeeland, and they came to the US in 1852. This is image is the only one I know of of the immigrant generation. I have never seen or heard of any pictures of her husband Peter or of Kate Snyder's parents.

More family here than we knew of!

Early on in my research I found the immigration record of Pieter Koole. Nothing in any of the family stories gave me any indication any other relatives also came to the US. But after masses amounts of research tracing the lineage back in time, I started to search sideways - the siblings of my ancestors and even spouses families. Well, I'd always had some information on them, but not much. And, of course, someone had invented the Internet by now, and more and more information was available there. (Many Dutch record indexes are online, now more scanned records are going up.)
Well, surprise, surprise! Leendert Koole, brother of Pieter, also came to the US. Leendert was about 5 years younger and arrived with his wife in 1853, one year after Pieter and Tona arrived. Leendert also went to Kent County, Michigan where he was known as Leonard.
Indexes are wonderful things, but no match for the actual records. On the passenger list, next after Leendert and Willemijna, was listed Barend Koole - another brother. But the list also notes that Barend died aboard ship.
Just recently, doing some more searches with the online indexes, I found long after, in 1881, a nephew, Adriaan Koole, son of a fourth brother Cornelis, also came to the US. Adriaan traveled with a wife and 2 children. So far I have not found his family in the US.
By just 2 generations later no one in the family seems to have had any contact with these relatives. Pieter was my great-great grandfather, so Leendert was a great great grand uncle to me. Maybe one of these days I'll track his or Adriaan's descendants to find present days cousins.