In the last few days of 2001, while surfing the web, I came across a web-page
created by James (Jelle) Kooistra.
On one of his pages (that happened to be written in Frisian, but which I could understand
sufficiently to get the gist) he mentions that he had been asked to translate
a paper from Old Dutch into English concerning the origins of the Couperus
family and John Cowper who fled from Scotland. I wrote to him asking about this
paper, and in a subsequent reply he enclosed a fascinating document.
What he sent was a computer-generated document created by an application (HAZA-DATA
from Telepas Software) that
retrieved its information from a genealogical database containing information
that Jim had entered originally. It contained a lot of obviously
carefully researched data - including dates and places of birth, marriage and death.
The data he sent me was originally created in researching another family tree which however had
some of its roots overlapping the Couperus tree. Thus while it only provides
a part of the latter, it is nevertheless a substantial part that provides
valuable extra information. This new information includes both some people who are not mentioned in the
original stamboom of Meester Couperus at all (such as female members as well as some
males who were missing) as well as details about dates and places
of both the new and the already-known entries.
I have updated the detailed indented "Stamboom" with some of the information he provided,
but because of the way that page is organised, with each entry limited to one line on the screen,
I could not include much of the finer details such as places of birth and additional narrative.
But this information could be of inestimable value to other Couperus researchers and
I wanted to make sure that such researchers would be able to find that information here.
Accordingly, I took Jim's original document and (after removing some entries that were
concerned only with "the other family" whose tree overlapped with the Couperus tree but
were otherwise irrelevant to the Couperus tree) I reformatted the information
suitable for presentation on a web page.
I have included in blue the generation/slot numbers I used
on the "Indented Stamboom" page for purposes of cross-reference. But because many entries
are completely new, I had to assign them new numbers, thus they do not appear necessarily
in simple numeric sequence but jump around quite a bit. However I have maintained the
style of indenting children under their father to allow readers to more easily see
the family relationships.
My thanks to Jim Kooistra for providing this wonderful addition to our knowledge
of the Couperus tree. I can heartily recommend a visit to his web site at
http://www.geocities.com/jkooistraca/
Be sure to visit his "Roots" articles if you can read Frisian (absolutely fascinating for
those who enjoy languages, word origins, and etymologies) but even if you don't,
he also has a wealth of other links on his pages to other sites involved in Friesland and Genealogy.
My web representation of "The Kooistra Document" follows below.
