Our Family Roots in The Netherlands

Oldeboorn 1977

The progenitors of the Haasdijk family married in Oldeboorn in 1683. The Haasdijk name dates from 1811 when Napoleon decreed that each family should choose a surname.

Welcome!

The Haasdijk family originates in the town of Oldeboorn in the province of Friesland in The Netherlands. Fifty years ago I made the first inroads into the Haasdijk ancestry. At that time the only method of research was to delve into the original books in the provincial archives in Leeuwarden, which resulted in the first attempt to find all our Haasdijk relatives world wide. By 1991 the book "The Haasdijk Family from 1683" was self published and made available to anyone in the family who was interested. Since that time I've expanded my research to include my mother's ancestry (Scheffer), my wife's family (Benner and Neering) and later the families of our sons' significant others. My final project is to study the historical population of the town of Oldeboorn and how they are interrelated. The surname Haasdijk was not chosen until December 1811 in Oldeboorn. Almost a century later my grandparents married and moved to Loosduinen in Zuid Holland. My parents, with five children at that time, immigrated to Edmonton in Canada in 1952. The Benner family roots came out of Den Haag and by way of Leeuwarden in Friesland ended up in the Amsterdam area of Noord Holland. Part of that family also immigrated to Edmonton also in 1952. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Hendrik Eberhard Schaffer citizenship

Johan Hendrik Eberhard Schaffer, the progenitor of the Scheffer family of Rotterdam, immigrated to The Netherlands from Hanover in 1753 to become a citizen of the city of Zwolle in 1755. He worked as a button maker (knoopmaker).