Vrouwtje Levie - Best guess at the biological mother of Clara Gelle Victor

Did you get all this information on that site? That is so interesting. I have cone across a few stories similar to the one you describe.

Hi Stephanie, yes, about Clara Victor and her ancestry, Akevoth is the only resource. A family researcher did some leg work about 40 years ago but got no further up than Clara's husband Hartog. I've searched Akevoth to go a few generations higher, and also Geni adds some local family knowledge from all over, it seems.

Hartog, being an illegitimate child, had a reduced pool of available partners, being the other outcasts from various reasons. Clara Victor is one such with no ancestry traced in Akevoth -- a person on the sidelines of society. Fortunately her mother is named at Clara's marriage but the only sensible Akevoth entry for that mother reveals a married woman of normal stability (and not about to have an extracurricular child with some "Victor"). So where did Clara come from?

Well, that mother has one sibling noted, a younger sister who falls into all the cracks and died 2 years after Clara's birth -- Vrouwtje Levie. It looks like she had a barren 6 year marriage, followed by her husband producing a child with another woman. Then Vrouwtje dies in August 1763 and her husband gets engaged to his next wife in September 1763, the very next month! How could that have happened so quickly?

Death in childbirth was common enough in those days, but if you're a happily married couple expecting a child, and your wife unexpectedly dies in childbirth, you don't get engaged to a new wife within one month. My reading of other such deaths indicates a typical period of one year, during which time a housekeeper moves in to look after the house & kids, and the usual outcome is that the widower marries the housekeeper. But in this case the gap was one month only.

So I'm looking at a barren 6 year marriage, followed by extracurricular activities by the husband (no word on what the wife was up to), and a death followed immediately by a re-engagement. Such a quick re-engagement shows it was ready all along, but under Jewish law a divorce must first be obtained, and new children of a divorcee have reduced privileges, whereas a widower's children have full legal privileges (except on the estate of the father, which doesn't apply here as the first marriage had no issue). So the husband was ready to remarry but needed the first wife to die -- and then, what do you know, she did die. There's a word for that and it's "murder".

So my reading of these dry old words is that Vrouwtje was killed, and then, 18 years later, her older sister Hendrikje delivers to the altar the girl Clara, a daughter she cannot have had. Thus, the infant girl of her murdered younger sister.

Now, of course, there may be a better, less violent, interpretation, or maybe the facts have simply been misreported across the centuries. So there can be no certainty. But when I turn the dry ink into living people across the span of 250 years, that is what I see in this instance.

Interested if you have any similar story to share, Stephanie.

Akevoth link for this story is http://dutchjewry.org/genealogie/gezin/hum_ashken/F9823/I16717 . Note that the dead children are all by the 2nd wife, and the live child "Judic Asser" is by a "Sientje".

I came across a similar thing when looking up somebody there was also another woman who had "love children" they were not married either. It really makes it much more "interesting" but you need the clues to look in the right direction

The supposition that Clara's father Victor was a Dutchman brings forth a new potential Scenario B: Vrouwtje and her husband may simply have been at loggerheads in their brief marriage, in a sort of "War of the Roses" way, thus no chance of reconciliation and no conjugal relations. So at the Oude Schans (Amsterdam's port) Vrouwtje meets a Dutch sailor (named "Victor") and they hit it off. He spirits her away to Holland and they have a baby. But she dies for some reason -- maybe she accidentally eats poison berries (which happened to my own ancestors when they left Amsterdam in the 1800's) or something else. Victor had no resource to raise the child so Vrowtje's body & the child were returned to Amsterdam and Hendrikje raises Clara.

The above scenario is of course entirely hypothetical and shows that many scenarios can be constructed, so perhaps it isn't necessary to favor one which features murder. cheers, EWF

Hypothetical but very interesting, Stephanie

I realize now that as Vrouwtje died about 2 years after Clara's birth, that timing indicates a death in childbirth. The sad end of Vrouwtje and Victor's dream. Vrouwtje's sister Hendrikje then offered to raise the toddler Clara. And this is the bare-bones story from the bare-bones events presented in Akevoth. EWF

All we know about Vrouwtje is that they lived in the Oude Schanz (the fenced-off port of Amsterdam), her marriage to Asser didn't work out (no offspring at all, not even stillborn), and that Asser got engaged within one month of Vrouwtje's death, to a girl from the same Lucas (Luijkes) family. Therefore when the marriage foundered, Vrouwtje's family was on Asser's side, i.e., Vrouwtje was being a bad girl. Maybe she ran off with the Dutch "Victor", or also possible, she became a bawdy girl in the Oude Schans where there was no lack of sailor customers. Maybe Clara's father was an unknown "Visser", altered to "Victor". Pretty clear that Clara's father was Dutch, and beyond that nothing is clear and never will be.