The Boerefijn's

Hello there,

Quite recently I've made a post about some research I have done on a particulair line, tracing it paternally to an ancestor named Balten.

An alleged inheritance document keeps popping up in other trees, where he is apparently named Balten Jansz, but the owner of this tree hasn't sent back a response to my email. Assuming that this inheritance does indeed exist, the Boerefijn line would end there. Balten's son's Jan and Willen would take on the sutname and after a couple of generations you have a whole bunch of small and big Boerefijn's, all descended fron Balten. Except that in a document from 1641, a man named Adriaen Henrixsz Boerefijn, is mentioned. A handful of his brothers and sisters appearing in the next decade. And in 1676 a brother and sister with the patronymic Jacobs and the surnane Boerefijn pop up. Forenames that I have never seen before, in the Boerefijn family I was researching.

Clearly the Boerefijn surname is older, Balten's son Willem, is estimated to have been born around 1620, and looking at these other mysterious Boerefijn's, the name was alive and well by then. One of the theories surrounding how the Boerefijn name came to be, describes how a similair sounding name in France Burfin, might have been brought to the Netherlands by Huguenots and was bastardized into Boerefijn by the locals.

But weirdly enough no earlier records than the one in 1641, that records a Boerefijn, exist. There doesn't seem to be a change in spelling either. Almost like the name was created in the 17th century, when my ancestor and his brother and the various other Boerefijn branches, appear. And still both families use completely different forenames, if the two families were so closely related they knew each other and chose to use the same surname, you would expect them to share some ancestral forenames.

Although the first theory is convincing, because of the lack of a Dutch translation of the surname and similarity to the French surname, it is quite striking how little Boerefijn's there are in the Netherlands in the 17th century, especially since these alleged descendants of Frenchmen have Dutch patronymics and forenames, meaning they would most likely already live in the Netherlands for quite some time, you would expext them to already have created their fair share of descendants.

Which theory seems more likely to you? A surname with a Dutch translation long lost to time or the offspring of a French surname?