Resolving a name confusion

In this post, I'll be writing about a brick wall that I've faced for some time. I'll write about the method
I used to get past it. While it may not be exactly the same as a name confusion in your family tree, I do hope that it will provide some potential ways you can get past your brick wall.

The Brick Wall

In my family tree I have people called Henri Magermans and Ida Ackermans, but I didn't have their date of birth. When looking online, I could only find a few records. This was odd as I was expecting many more.
I was missing their birth, death, and wedding records as well as the records some of the children I already knew they had. I was also stuck because I didn't have any information on their parents or siblings.
This was 4 years ago in the days of the old site Genlias; so I decided it was time to tackle this again...

What I already knew
I knew that they both lived in the Netherlands. I also knew that Henri was a  joiner as it says this on the marriage record for my great grandparents. I also had a note from 2010 when my Oma told me that there may have been another child called Gonda.
I also knew some of the children they had, including Johannes Joseph Magermans, for whom I had the birth and marriage record.

Next Steps

Using wiewaswie, I found people called Pieter Hendrik Magermans and Johanna Ida Ackermans. They lived at the same time as Henri and Ida and in an area close by.

With this information, I found that Pieter Hendrik Magermans was also a joiner and that he had a child called Hubertina Aldegonda Magermans.

I asked one of the Facebook groups I'm a member of to give me some help with this and they thought that Henri and Ida were also Pieter Hendrik Magermans and Johanna Ida Ackermans, but I wanted a way to be sure. Someone gave me a link to scans of their birth certificates and I saw that this site also linked to scans of the old Netherlands Bevolkingsregisters.

I made a spreadsheet to make a timeline of all the births, marriages, and deaths for ‘both’ couples and their children. I colour-coded the children who had multiple entries, so I could see if the parents name stayed stable for multiple records for individuals. What I found was:

1. The parents names did stay stable for individual children, for example a parents name on the birth record and marriage record for Johannes Joseph were the same. 
2. That each child was born in a different year - if multiple children were born within a year, this would have hinted that I was looking at two couples rather than one.
3. That the main 'name change' seemed to occur after they moved to Oud-Valkenburg from Schin op Geul. But that one birth had the full name and then they went to middle names.

A spreadsheet timeline to understand the individuals I was following.

BUT, importantly, this didn't 'prove' that they were the same couple. So I starting thinking about how to prove whether Henri and Ida were Pieter Hendrik and Joanna Ida.

The solution
At this point, what sprang to mind was that I needed to find the whole family documented at the same place and at the same time. The most obvious thing to do was to check the population records. 

After scrolling through many MANY scanned pages, I finally found the whole family in the Oud-Valkenburg census for 1850-1900.

My ancestors in the Oud-Valkenburg census for 1850-1900

This population register showed the couple as Henri and Ida, but has all of their children, including the children I already knew about and with dates I already had. Finding Henri and Ida's birth records, also led to finding the names of their parents.

So, I’m excited to have found that even though they both decided to go by their middle names in later life, that they are the same people! I had read that this name change was fairly common, but I hadn't come across it before and felt daunted that both of them had opted to use their middle names.

In future posts, I'll be writing about the resources that I used to find out all of this information, so add me to your blog reader, or sign up to receive new posts by email!