The Beijen/Beyen
Family Site

by Laurens Beijen		 The Hengelo family

From Bien to Bijen



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To the top of the page 		The map on the right shows the area of Hengelo in Twente (the eastern part of the province of Overijssel) in the middle of the nineteenth century. In that time Hengelo was a rural town, and it had no more than a few thousand inhabitants. The origin of the Hengelo family Beijen laid in this area.

Lukas and Willem Bien (Biën)

The first ancestor of the Hengelo family whose name we know was a certain Lukas Bien (1.1) who must have lived around 1750 in the settlement Woolde, west of the town of Hengelo in the municipality of Hengelo. His surname was probably pronounced with two syllables (like the 3rd and 4th word in the English sentence "I will be an engineer"). In standard Dutch a name with that pronunciation would be written as Biën; the diaeresis (two dots over the e) indicates that a new syllable begins. "Bien" without a diaeresis would be pronounced as the English "Bean". But in Twente many people don't use standard Dutch. In official documents the name of his descendants was sometimes written with a diaeresis.

Up to now, the name of Lukas Bien has only been found in an annex to the marriage certificate of one of his grandchildren, Gerardus Joannes Bien (3.1) (or Biën). In 1824 Gerardus married Gesina Lansink in the neighbouring municipality of Weerselo. In the certificate the parents of the bridegroom were recorded as "the late Willem Biën and Joanna Biën, Farmers, who have lived and died in this Municipality as appears from a declaration of neighbours, which declaration also states the death of his Grandparents".
That declaration had to be given because there was no official civil registry prior to 1813. In Twente the churches did not register the burials either. The declaration stated that all parents and grandparents of the bride and the bridegroom had died before. As paternal grandparents of Gerardus Joannes were recorded Lukas Bien and Geertrui Gaame; as maternal grandparents Hendrik Bien and Elisabeth Scholten. All of them had been farmers; they had lived in Woolde in the municipality of Hengelo.
Nothing is known of the forefathers of Lukas Bien or his other children. That is why we begin in the overview of the Hengelo family with Lukas Bien (1.1), his son Willem Bien (2.1) and so forth.

The baptism of Gerardus Joannes

According to one of the annexes to the marriage certificate from 1824, the bridegroom, who was recorded as Gerardus Joannes Biën, was baptized on November 7, 1792 in Weerselo.
Indeed, the baptism can be found in the records of the Catholic parish of Weerselo. In Latin: 7 Novemb[ris] Baptizatus Gerardus Jo[ann]es filius Wilhe[l]mi et Johanne Bien, patrinis Gerardo Jo[ann]e Brugginck et Gesina Bien. In English: The 7th of November baptized Gerardus Joannes, son of Willem and Johanna Bien, godparents Gerardus Joannes Brugginck and Gesina Bien.
Unfortunately it is not sure that the right name of the bridegroom was recorded in the marriage certificate. It is also possible that the bridegroom of 1824 was a brother of the child that was baptized in 1792. This question is discussed on the next page.

A new residence and a new name

Shortly after the wedding of Gerardus Joannes (or whoever) he and his wife Gesina Lansink moved to Woolde, where his grandparents had also lived. Probably they moved in with the family of Gesina. According to the marriage certificate she was a woman farmer in the municipality of Hengelo and was also born there.
One year later, when the birth of their son Willem was registered, the father was recorded for the first time in the registers of Hengelo. This time however, he was not named as Gerardus Joannes Bien/Biën, but as Johannes Bijen. After Willem, five other children were born in Hengelo, three of whom died in infancy. In all these certificates of birth and death the father was named as Jan Bijen.

The difference between the names "Gerardus Joannes" and "Jan" looks big, but it could still be explained. In Catholic families, especially in the eastern part of the Netherlands, it was not uncommon to use in daily life the second Christian name, or a shortened form of it. When taking out a marriage licence, an excerpt of the register of baptisms or births had to be produced. So it is most obvious that Gerardus Joannes was recorded in the Weerselo marriage certificate with his official Christian names. When he settled in Hengelo, there was no need for official papers: in those days there was no register of the whole population. When he submitted births or deaths, he only had to mention his name by word of mouth.
We may assume that Jan was not very interested in the way his name had to be written: the marriage certificate shows that he could not write. In a society where writing still played a minor role, the difference between Biën and Bijen was rather unimportant: in Twente those names are pronounced in the same way. Apparently the officials in Hengelo thought that the man who had settled there had to be recorded as Jan Bijen.

On the next pages more is said about the Hengelo family.

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