Introducing Jacob Grandia and Maria Colyn
The Souvenir History of Pella Iowa 1847-1922 mentions Jacob Grandia on page 146. There is no picture of him, but there is a paragraph describing him. It says, “Jacob Grandia was born in Schravandelen, Province of Gelderland, Netherlands, in 1826. At the youthful age of nineteen, he emigrated to America in the spring of 1847 and was among the very first to arrive in this community. He was a lad with ambition and usefulness. He, with Henry Hospers, assisted the surveyors in platting the town of Pella. He was united in marriage to Miss Marie Colyn, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Leendert Colyn. To this union were born six sons and three girls … Mr. Grandia died in June 1868.”
Early in my marriage, when I was a new resident of Pella, I knew I had ancestors with the Grandia name, but I didn’t have much information on them. I’d purchased a copy of this book to learn more about the Van Zante family, but when I discovered this paragraph about a Grandia with roots in Pella back to its very beginning, I was intrigued. I spent time doing the research until I had his story pieced together.
Jacob and Maria Grandia are my great-grandmother’s grandparents. I know that goes back a little way, but it also forms a strong link down through the generations of my family. My great-grandmother, Adrianna Granda Van Zante, was the daughter of Jacob A. Grandia, and he was the fifth son of Jacob and Maria.
The Souvenir History of Pella claims that Jacob was nineteen when he left Holland for America. In researching his life, I’ve found some discrepancies on his age. This resource lists him in his teen years, genealogy on the Grandia family says he was born in 1822. The ship logs show his age as twenty-four, and his marriage record to Maria, occurring in Pella in February of 1850, says he is twenty-seven. Since the marriage record is the most concrete of any of the sources, I used that age to determine his birth year, and also his age at the time of immigration.
Many people have done diligent work in researching this man’s life, so I certainly do not want to discredit any of those records. However, putting his birthdate in the year 1823 makes him twenty-three at the time he sailed for North America. A hero in his early twenties serves the story well, so since this work is fictional and isn’t necessarily an exhaustive record of a person’s life, I’m going to keep him at the age of twenty-three.
Genealogy shows his birthday to be September 1, so he will celebrate it and turn twenty-four upon his arrival in Pella.
According to the same genealogy, informed by the Grandia family website (familiegrandia.nl), Jacob was born in ‘s Gravendeel. The spelling of the town given in the Souvenir History of Pella was likely the way the name sounded when it was spoken, so it looks a little different typed out than the actual Dutch spelling does. This little town is near Dordrecht, south of Rotterdam a few miles. This would have located his birth in South Holland and not in Gelderland like the Souvenir History book says. But Dordrecht is very near the line between the three provinces of South Holland, Noord Brabant, and Gelderland.
Fiction writing allows scope for creativity as long as the finished product is plausible. Since the group that immigrated with Scholte was a close-knit community, I am going to have Jacob in friendship with the Van Zante brothers, five of whom sailed for America in the 1850’s. They lived in Gelderland, so approaching the story in this way gives Jacob the connections with the Gelderland folks to say he was “from” there, as history implies, even though he may not have necessarily been born there.
His typical costume would have been long pants, a vest, a striped shirt, and a flat hat, all in dark colors.
Jacob’s father died in May of 1826 when he was three years old. His mother died in 1832 when he was nine, and his brother John, born in 1826, died as a child. Jacob was alone in the world, so he went to live with a lady named Jenneke Reedijk who died in 1846 at the age of seventy-four. Her relationship with Jacob was unknown. She may have been a relative or only a housekeeper.
The last mention of Jacob is on April 3, 1847, when he was officially removed from the civil administration of ‘s Gravendeel. The column titled “left for” says “to North America.” He sailed on the Nagasaki, one of four ships secured by Scholte for the transport of the colony. It made the trip across the Atlantic in thirty-six days, on the route from Rotterdam to Baltimore, Maryland.
Curiously, his name is not listed with the ship’s passengers in the Pella Souvenir History Book, but it is shown in the large volumes of Pella History Books where the ship logs are published. His age is given here as twenty-four and also confirms his presence on this particular ship. He likely traveled in steerage, so may have been a more transient, elusive passenger than an older married man with children who functioned as the head of a household. Jacob is listed on the ship log with other young men who probably all made the journey together.
Jacob Grandia settled in the Pella area and farmed on the border of Lake Prairie Township and Black Oak Township.
Maria Colyn
Maria’s story is more subdued than Jacob’s. She is mentioned only in the list of passengers on the ship Pieter Floris that sailed from Amsterdam to Baltimore. Her trip to America took quite a bit longer, requiring two full months at sea until reaching their destination.
She was born in 1826 in the province of Noord Brabant. Her father likely farmed since the majority of the people who came to Iowa with Scholte were farmers. At the time of immigration, Maria was a twenty-one-year-old unmarried woman. She traveled with a cluster of family members, including her father, Leendert, and her mother. The ship log only gives her the initial L., so I invented a name for her and will call her Lana in the book. There were also two brothers and one sister, all in their teen years.
From her mother’s side of the family came J.W. de Moor, his wife, and his school-aged daughter. From her father’s side of the family came Huibert Colyn, and his four-month-old daughter Alberta Jacoba. It’s easy to assume Huibert lost his wife in childbirth, so I am going to use that theme as part of the overall plot of the story.
The Colyns and de Moors all survived the trip and reunite with the other Dutch travelers in St. Louis. There, they are given a bit of a respite from travel while the Land Committee starts its exploration to Iowa in search of farm ground to purchase. Maria and her family, along with Jacob and many other friends, join in worship services at a Presbyterian church they are allowed to use during their time in the city.
Maria, her mother, and the other Noord Brabant women would have made quite the impression on the Americans dressed in their dark Dutch dresses and the lacy headgear known as poffers.
Maria’s brother, Jacob Colyn, is mentioned in The History of Marion County as a farmer and stock raiser. He was born in 1829 on the line between North and South Holland. He spent his boyhood days on his father’s farm and attending school.
This brief summary of her brother provides clues to Maria’s origins and childhood as well. She and Jacob Grandia are among the first couples to marry in the new world, and then they settled on a farm and raised a family.
A quick note to end this blog post relates to the sources I quoted here. Blog Post #1 mentions all of the books I used to research for this project, so I will refer the reader to that article instead of formally citing them here. I will draw on those sources many times going forward, so will continue to encourage my readers to refer back to my first blog post to learn more about the sources I relied on to gather my information.
The photographs in this blog post are taken from Dutch Costumes, a Look into the Past, by Jacki Craver, and Phyllis Zylstra. Photography by Desha Bruxvoort. Printed in Pella in 2007.
