Hello and welcome!

Are you interested in learning about your family history? Are you also interested in seeing how your part of the family fits in with your ancestors and other relatives? Would you like to have a written family history to pass down to your children? Great! This is what I am trying to do!

My name is Yolanda Paashuis. Our branch of the family immigrated to Canada from Lichtenvoorde in 1954. I became interested in genealogy and family history since we are so far away from the place where our ancestors lived. Besides being very interesting, family roots are important because it explains a lot about who you are. As time goes on and more of us move away from our ancestral home, much of our history and our family connections will become lost. Even for those who live near their ancestral home, the passage of time means the knowledge of what happened long ago becomes lost. Hopefully, with some help from you, I can preserve some of our history and record how we are all connected to each other.

I am looking for stories, information, historical documents and photographs relating to the Gierkink family. This would include members of the Budding, Gunnewick, Himmelberg, Kanters, Niewenhuis, Oosterholt, Vos and other families connected to the Gierkink family. While this project will take a while, when it's done everything will be in book form and you can obtain your own copy (for printing and shipping costs only). The book will include family genealogy, photographs, historical information, some local history and lots of family stories (if you can help me with this).

Since I would like to protect the privacy of the younger members of the family, stories that include them in anything more than a very general way would be unsuitable. However, there are a lot of family members born before World War II who may or may not be living. I would like to preserve their history as much as possible. They are also a direct link to their parents and grandparents and so would be able to pass down some of that history as well. For me, my parents were born before WWII, so I would gather stories from them about themselves, their parents and grandparents. If my daughter would submit a story, she would tell about her grandparents and very little about her parents. Keeping this in mind, anything significant in your family's life would be suitable, whether it was something to cheer about, hardships endured, or something that altered the course of things. All these things give us an idea what your family is like and what we are all like as a group. I would also like to know, if possible, what your family did (or still does) for a living, if there was military service, and such. Please include a small genealogy that includes you, your parents and grandparents (dates and places of births, marriages and deaths, if applicable) so I know where you fit into the family. However, I do not plan to list people born after WWII in the genealogy part of the book unless there is a very strong interest in this.

Please do not send me any original documents, bidprentjes or photographs. However, I would love to have photocopies or scanned copies of any of these items you wish to share. Faces are wonderful to see and so is the old family home or farm! Documents or newspaper clippings that detail special events relating to the family are also welcome.

Thank you for anything that you have to share!

I hope to hear from you soon!