In the upcoming House of Representatives elections, there are surprisingly few Brabant residents in an eligible position. But to paint parliament a bit red and white, you can also vote for someone with a Brabant surname and there are a surprising number of them. Koen Wijn and Mark Versteden from the Omroep Brabant radio program WAKKER! went to investigate.
About fifty candidate MPs have a surname that refers to a place in the Netherlands. Of these, 28 are located in Brabant, although many of them do not live in our province. These include names such as Van Son, Van Breugel, Van Lierop, Van Dinther and Van Schijndel. “That’s special,” says presenter Koen Wijn. “It seems very coincidental that there are so many Brabant names.”
But how did they get that name? The radio presenters called in Jos Swanenberg, professor at Tilburg University and specialized in names and their history. And guess what? It is not surprising that many names refer to Brabant.
“It is something typical of Brabant, Van Cuijk and Van Oirschot.”
“It is typical Brabant to use a place name as a surname,” Swanenberg explains. “Van Cuijk, Van Oirschot and Van Schaijk occur regularly. In the north you see names like Van Leeuwarden or Van Sneek much less often. They did it differently there. Many names end in -stra and -ma. Minkema for example, Zandstra and Ritsma. Those names often also refer to a village or even to one farm, but they do not do so with ‘Van’, but in a different way.”
Swanenberg says that the basic registration of family names started in 1811. “Then surnames became mandatory, whether you wanted to or not. People often chose a surname that referred to their place of residence or profession. So we know for a fact that people now called Van Os have ancestors who originally came from Oss. That could be two or six generations ago.”
Many of the candidate MPs no longer live in our province. “You usually see that these people did not live much further and often ended up somewhere else in Brabant. Although you cannot say with one hundred percent certainty, you really have to dig a little deeper.”
“Things didn’t go so well in Brabant in the past.”
The only candidate who still lives in the place his name refers to is Henk van Tilborg (50PLUS) from Tilburg. For example, Anton van Schijndel (FvD) and Carline van Breugel (D66) are all the way in Amsterdam and Jasper van Os (VVD) lives in Emmeloord.
The radio presenters wonder why the original Brabanders no longer live in the area. That can also be explained, according to Swanenberg.
“People used to move often within the Netherlands. In the nineteenth century, things were not going well in Brabant at all. There was little money to be earned, so people moved to places where there were better opportunities, for example with the rise of the textile industry in the city of Tilburg. They sought their fortune as workers instead of as poor farmers. This is why you see that these surnames cluster in the larger cities.”
People who want to know where their surname comes from can contact the Dutch Family Name Bank. There you can also see how many people have the same surname and where in the Netherlands they live.