BOISSEVAIN Gens1-9 | Tice's Numbering

Noah Sisk
Took a risk.
He spent his June
Off the dune. (Clerihew by JT Marlin.)
Here we are hard at work on the East
End of Long Island, June 2016.
L to R: Noah Sisk and John Tepper Marlin.

Noah Sisk, grandson of Pamela Boissevain and great-grandson of Tice Boissevain, has been working with me for a few weeks this month.

We attempted to finish the task that Tice was laboring over when he died in 1998, creating a numbering system for every member of the Boissevain family, male and female.

Part of his motivation may have been that he had three daughters, and they would be losing–in the normal course of things–the Boissevain name. The three daughters were all at the 2016 reunion in Amsterdam and were major participants in the walking tours of the Herengracht and Keizersgracht.

Noah and I have restricted ourselves to filling out Tice's documentation of the first nine generations of the family, starting with Lucas Boissevain who fled France after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and made being a Huguenot a treasonous act in France.

Tice's numbering system has significant advantages over the numbering in the Nederland's Patriciaat:

• It includes the descendants of female children who in the past have not customarily retained the Boissevain name as their surname.
• It avoids Roman numerals, which are difficult to sort by computer.
• The system is an accepted genealogical numbering system called the Henry Method. 

I have added a few other innovations, for example putting in trailing zeroes to indicate the head of a group so that each column is sortable. There was a reason that the Romans were bad at mathematics–they lacked the zero.

I have assigned the numbers as Tice did in sets of three, one set in each of the first three columns. Shown below is the first page of the table, where the Krusemans (lost in the NP format) dominate the entries.

Noah and I are attempting to assemble the information in the form of a book. The first six generations are manageable as a single chapter. After that the table will have to be broken up into Family Groups–the Danieltjes, Jantjes, Charlestjes, and so forth as Tice did at the 1992 Boissevain Reunion, 24 years ago.

Boissevain Family, Gens 1-9, As Numbered by Tice Boissevain