My newest family members are Ronald and his father, Tjerk.  Tjerk’s parents and children emigrated to Belgium in May of 1957.  That’s a story I’d like to hear!  Although Tjerk doesn’t speak English, Ronald has been translating our correspondence.  Within a couple days, Tjerk sent me this message full of genealogy – 4 generations worth.  My head is already spinning.

Why?  There’s names that I’ve never seen before! I have Ronald’s great grandfather in my database but never any of Jakob Doddema‘s (1888-1979) children.  Tjerk takes it a little further back with the Jakob’s own grandfather, Geert Hinderks Doddema (1831-1908).  While I thought I had this completed…Tjerk and Ronald hand me some more names that weren’t in the Genlias database, which is understandable since it takes time to add records.

I’ll be adding the message to the forum for further research in another post.

At this point, I just want to thank Tjerk and Ronald for their help!  Without them, I wouldn’t be able to put all this together.

For those of you interested, how are we related?  Ronald’s great grandfather, Jakob Doddema and my grandfather, Tammo Doddema were 4th cousins.  Small world indeed.

The following are the contents of the email that I received:

Thomas Bernard Wheeler is the son of Mary Byrnes Wheeler. Following the “death” of her husbanc in Ireland MBW and her 3 sons migrated to USA. Stayed a time in Pennsylvania. Bought land from a speculator in what is now Kandiyohi country, just north of Atwater, between Wheeler and Schultz lakes. They came to Minnesota from Pennsylvania around 1854-1855. Patrick W. Wheeler now farms the homestead. If you do the math, the Wheeler farm is now in the Wheeler family for 150+ years.

My mother is Hannorah Monica Wheeler Klukas. Her Father is William Wheeler. William Wheeler is the son of one of Mary Byrnes Wheelers’ 3 sons who came with her from Ireland, who is also named William Wheeler. Thus, my great grandfather and my great-great grandmother came to Minnesota with Thomas B Wheeler.

I had heard that some of the Wheelers went to Montana to try ranching, etc., but it sounded to me that things did not go too well due to drought and the Great Depression.

If you know more family history please feel free to add information.

robert klukas

Thank you Robert!  I gave it to my mother-in-law and she was ecstatic!  How am I related?  I’m the husband of the 2 x great granddaughter of Thomas Bernard Wheeler.  Now that’s pretty cool.

If you’d like to provide more information about Thomas Bernard Wheeler and his relatives, please feel free to contact me.  Although registration is not required to participate in the forum discussion of Thomas Bernard Wheeler, it helps.

I look forward to hearing from you.

• Vincent
• Ronald
• Wim
• Bianca
• Johanna
• Karin
• Christian
• Jan

I met them on Facebook and the Dutch version called Hyve.  A few have been helpful, a few hesitant but overall everybody wants to contribute in one way or another.  Most of the information received so far has been corrections to what I already have.  Nice!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to contact more as time goes on.  The language barrier makes it a little more difficult but thank goodness for online translator tools.

Again, welcome.  Please feel free to post in the forum your family stories, recipes or just plain getting to know each other.  If you’d like to submit information, please leave me a message or a forum post.

Here’s the contents of the email:

Good Morning,

I stumbled on your site by accident-I had no idea that there was anything out there on our family.  I started looking around a few years ago and contacted someone in the Netherlands and was going to continue, but life got in the way.

Anyway, you’ve got some awesome work going here?  I want to spend more time looking around.

I am the daughter of Harm and the grand-daughter of Dries and Johanna and the great grand-daughter of Drees and Altja (sp).  Where do you come in?

I just spent a couple of hours with Ray Dykhouse this week.  He has been researching his Dykhouse roots and has some great pictures, a few of them were Doddes.

He is the son of Drice Dykhouse who is the son of Emma Dodde who is the sister of my grandfather Dries.

If you get some time let me know a little about you?  Meantime thanks again for the work you’ve done.

Happy Saturday!  Gotta get the walking shoes on, there are five mile of pavement to hit before I start my day.

Shirley

Welcome Shirley!  I look forward to working with you and would love to learn more about your family.

(I’ve had this post saved since 12 July 2008.  Finally getting around to posting.)

It appears one of my sources has errorneous information so I’ll need to really look at what else was submitted by him as at this point it’s somewhat questionable but I digress.

I’d like to officially welcome my 6th. cousin, once removed, Geert Jan Doddema to our worldwide family and DoddemaGen.

Jeannette Bakker herself corrected this error by sending me an email.  I’m happy to say that she was polite about it.  I don’t know if I would have been.  I apologized profusely and if you’re looking at this Jeannette, again I apologize.

I extended this invitation to Jeannette just as I’m extending this to you: if you notice any errors on my site, please feel free to submit corrections. I would really appreciate it.  My goal is to have accurate and reliable information.

With her permission, the email reads:

I am a grandson of Jantina Doddema (born: 2-11-1900). I can tell you that she was married with Roelof Ros. She died at the age of 73 on 27 april 1974. She is buried at the cemetary in Wildervank (the Netherlands). Her parents Steven Doddema and Aaltje Bosscher are also buried there.

I have a picture of around 1917 of them with their 5 daughters.I have several old pictures of mij great-grandparents and their daughters.

Greetings Nico Ros.

I’m really excited to hear that our family is looking for more information on one another.  Hopefully this site will become a focal point and a central repository of information, news and such for the Doddema’s as I envision.  I’m looking forward to the future of DoddemaGen!  Exciting times are ahead.

Welcome Nico.  We hope to hear more from you!