What is "Vroom" in surname of Cornelis Pieterszen "Cors" Corssen Vroom?

Question

We have a number of sibling profiles to merge, and need to pick a final NAB. I suggest that it should be Pieterszen, since he was evidently a son of Pieters in the Netherlands, but there is no such profile NAB yet. I think the Corssen (and typo variants) that we see in some of these is merely a projection backwards from his Corssen children, based on his first name being Cornelis, and Cors for short.

1) Should we create a new Pieterszen profile in order to have a proper NAB?

The closest existing seems to be this Petersen-33

2) Should Vroom be the NAB? But then where does that come from? Is it a later adopted Americanized last name, and not a proper NAB?

Comments

I imagine by now you've settled the issue of LNAB for the profile(s) in question, but just FYI ... Vroom is a Dutch surname appearing in Netherland's baptismal and marriage records of the 17th and 18th centuries, as microfilmed and indexed by www.familysearch.org. One example is the 1659 marriage of a Pieter Vroom in "Nederlands Hervormde Kerk, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands".

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P.S. You really got me curious (I'm helping a friend with Vrooms), so I did some looking at naming customs in the Netherlands. One source says that a boy's first name would be his own and his second name would be his father's first name + "sen" for "son of". Thus, Cornelis Pieterszen Corssen Vroom would be Cornelis, son of Pieter, Corssen Vroom. Perhaps Corssen was Cornelis's mother's LNAB.

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welcome to the wonderful world of New Netherland "surnames", where the possibilities are endless. I've been working with Welsh names most recently, so I'm a little rusty on Dutch patronymics, but yup - sen, son, and even just "s" turns Dad's given name into an identifying name for his children. So, for instance, Jan Joosten (John, son of Justus), might have a son named Joost Jansen (Justus, son of John). Or the son might just be shown as Joost Jans in records. New Netherland names have the added fun of being recorded by the English after 1674.

When I first started working on New Netherland profiles, my mentor offered the following explanation, which you might find of interest:

This is my current understanding. Replace [Jan] with any father's name. The meaning of the patronymic is [Jan]'s son or [Jan]'s daughter. In formal Dutch this is [Jan]szoon or [Jan]sdochter, where zoon = son and dochter = daughter. Note that the 's' following the name is a possessive 's'. These are sometimes abbreviated [Jan]sz(n) or [Jan]sd(r), where the (n) and (r) are optional). You see this form in the very earliest New Netherland records, but about the time of the New Netherland settlement the Dutch started spelling 'zoon' as 'sen', and at the same time using it for both males and females. Note that in Dutch 'oo' is pronounced like the 'o' in go, not the 'oo' in zoom, so 'zoon' and 'sen' are not pronounced very differently. With the new spelling, [Jan]'s son would be formally spelled Janssen, a form you often see. But often the double 's' is contracted to a single 's', and 'sen' is contracted to 'se' or 's'. All of these forms are found in the records for Joost Janssen. Given all of that, all the following patronymics are correct for Janssen: Janszoon, Janszn, Jansz, Janssen, Jansse, Janss, Jansen, Janse and Jans.

Hope that helps!

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ps - did you see the answer selected as best? ... that Vroom is Dutch for devout?

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Thanks Liz ... :-)

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For LNAB and original spellings of names for this family, one might go to the place of origin - the Netherlands. The Netherlands Institute for Art History has a profile for Dutch artist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom 1562/3-1640 at https://rkd.nl/en/artists/82222. But even there LNAB is ambiguous. This artist is listed at the site as the son of sculptor and ceramist Cornelis Hendricksen and the nephew of Fredrik Hendriksz Vroom. At the same time, the artist had one son named Cornelis Hendricksz and another named Frederick Vroom. My point here is that Vroom is a well-known (at least in the art community) Dutch surname, and it's interesting that the artist was about 50 years older than Cornelis Pieterszen "Cors" Corssen Vroom and lived about 40 miles away from Leiden.

As far as American documentation goes, Garret Dumont Wall Vroom, son of New Jersey Governor Peter Dumont Vroom (1791-1772), wrote a brief genealogy of the family going back to "Cornelius Peterson (Vroom)", as he wrote it, born 1611, coming from Langeraer, Holland to Long Island, New York, and marrying Tryntge Hendricks. He wrote further that two of their sons, Peter and Hendrick, dropped "Vroom" and were known thereafter as Corsen/Corson, while the third son, Hendrick Corsen Vroom retained "Vroom" and left a line of descendants who all were known as Vrooms, including the Governor. Garret Vroom's article was published posthumously in the "Somerset County Historical Quarterly", Vol. V-1916 at pp. 254-6. An ebook is at https://archive.org/details/somersetcountyhi05hone.

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Loretta, your citation of Dutch artist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom 1562/3-1640 is not part of this lineage. So I don't think it is applicable to this particular descendant line.

Just because some some people used the sobriquet Vroom as a surname does not make it the ancestral surname in all lineages.

On this line, it seems to have been not much more than a sobriquet, and then adopted as surname by *some* of the descendants only later in America.

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It stretches the imagination to think that the same sobriquet, particularly one like Vroom or pious, would be given to two or more unrelated individuals located within a few miles of each other. Since it was doubted earlier in this conversation that Vroom was a Dutch surname when Cornelis lived, my citation is perfectly relevant because it establishes that Vroom was a surname there even before Cornelis.

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I can confirm that Liz Shifflett's response of 20 Oct 2015 is correct; all of the patronyms that she lists are alternatives of Janssen.  I can add that the Corson DNA project (which I coordinate) has tested individuals with the Corssen/Corson surname and the Vroom surname who document male-line descent from Cors Pieterszen. Their Y-DNA genetic signatures do not match, indicating that at least one of the two family lines does not descend from Cors Pieterszen.  I am currently searching for individuals with the Vroom surname in the Netherlands, perhaps related to Dutch artist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, to see if their genetic signature matches those of the Vrooms already tested. More information at http://www.corsondna.com.

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I've just discovered a series of Vroom pages at the website of the University of Amsterdam's Centre for the Study of the Golden Age.  They predate the Vroom family in America and include four generations all with the surname Vroom.  The pages reveal a great deal of data for the family, but I'll just the names and dates for one direct line as the appear at the site ...

Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom d. aft. 1555 in Haarlem
Cornelis Hendricksz. Vroom d. 1573-03-01 in Haarlem
Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom b. 1562 or 1563 in Haarlem; buried 1640-02-04 in Haarlem
Cornelis Hendriksz. Vroom b. 1591-01-01 - 1592-12-31; buried 1661-09-16

You can see that the middle name is an abbreviation and consistently employs the letter "z".  "Zoon" is the Dutch word for "son".

Following is the URL of the University's page for the 1591 Vroom.  You can navigate backward to each preceding generation.  I wouldn't argue with the University of Amsterdam ...
http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/persons/8103

Answer 1

Vroom is Dutch for devout. Dutch site Wie Was Wie (Who Was Who) has loads of entries with this name, and many "de Vroom" too. I can't find relevant entries for this person though.

Whether you use Vroom as LNAB is up to you. I do that only when I can prove that a person was born or baptized with that name.

 

Comments

Vroom would be the surname...
Pietersen/Petersen/Peters/Peeters/Pietersen are all patronyms.
What the exact origin of *this* surname is, is anybody's guess.
It could be devout, it could be something else.

There is a place in the Netherlands called "Vroomshoop", roughly translatable to "A devout's hope".

Answer 2

The name Vroom is of Anglo-Saxon origin and came from when the family lived in the region of Froome in the counties of Somerset and Hereford. The surname Vroom originally derived from German origin and was later adopted by the English as a local name in the 12th century.