JOHANNA JACOBA VAN DER GROEF (1862 - ???) , a rather exceptional Dutch-American life ....

# This ( not so very bright , but it's the best we can do ... ) picture was taken in Paterson , N.J. , USA , (more than) 100 years ago ; the woman on this picture míght be , just míght be , Johanna Jacoba van der Groef .
## The Dutch - American life of JOHANNA JACOBA VAN DER GROEF , who was the eleventh and last child of her father JACOB VAN DER GROEF , and just the second and only viable child of her mother , Jacob's third wife , CORNELIA TULP , bore some remarkable similarities to the life of her halfsister Cornelia van der Groef .

For instance : like her halfsister Cornelia , Johanna Jacoba worked as a maid-servant in several places scattered over the island Goeree - Overflakkee : Nieuwe - Tonge , Oude - Tonge , Melissant , Sommelsdijk and Middelharnis .
At the age of 22 , in the year 1884 , Johanna Jacoba gave birth , as an únmarried woman ... , to a healthy son , and she must have named this son after herself ( rather exceptional in those days , but considering the circimstances very much understandable) , since her son's two given names were : Johannis Jacobus - so like his mother this son was blessed , so to speak , with twó different firstnames , which was also a thing that was rather special in those days on the very traditional , protestant and conservative environment on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee .

But being an unmarried woman and living in the 19th century in such an environment , life was bound to cause severe problems of all kinds , which may have caused heavy 'turbulence' in the life of our Johanna Jacoba .......so , it didn't come as a big 'surprise' to us to find out that a few years later - and once again 'in the footsteps' of her halfsisiter Cornelia - Johanna Jacoba made the important , and probably the very most important decision during her lifetime , to emigrate with her son to that gigantic land all the way at the other side of the big ocean , to that more liberal immense country with all those wonderful great opportunities .......

On june 8 , 1887 Johanna Jacoba van der Groef , in the company of her son Johannis Jacobus , left Nieuwe - Tonge , stepped , probably somewhere in the harbour of Rotterdam , on a ship with North America as its ultimate destination , and , as far as we know , would never ever return to her homeland ........
Though we have no hard information about the exact destination , we may assume that Johanna Jacoba and her son , shortly after having arrived in the United States , will have traveled straight away to the house of Johanna's halfsister Cornelia ('the woman of those footsteps') , who lived in the USA together with her son Mattheus in the place of Paterson , in the state of New Jersey .
And at this point the description of the life of Johanna Jacoba may have stopped as a result of not having been able to find any more specific information about the sequel of her life in America , íf we hadn't discovered that a certain Johanna Van Der Groef had given birth in the city of Paterson , N.J. , in the year 1887 , to a son with the name of Jacob Van Der Groef ..... and since we couldn't find any other Johanna van der Groef in that period of time in the USA who could have given birth to a child as an unmarried woman , we must assume that our Johanna Jacoba van der Groef became the mother of a son as an unmarried woman once again (!) , but his time in the United States of America , which can't have made life much easier for her , bacause now Johanna Jacoba , as a single mother , even had to raise twó sons ....

E P I L O G U E

What kind of (hard) life , filled with sorrow and shame (?!) , could Johanna Jacoba have had in very conservative thinking Goeree-Overflakkee in the Netherlands , and what kind of , possibly less difficult , life can she have had in the more liberal thinking USA of those days , by the end of the 19th century ???

We have lost track with her and her two sons in the USA ever since the year 1887 , and that míght mean that Johanna Jacoba had (finally) found a husband to whom she got married , a husband who , at the occasion of the wedding , also would have legitimatized her two sons then , so that they all , from that moment on , lived under a new , to us unknown , familyname , and possibly they all lived very happily ever after ......... well , let's just hope that that is indeed what happened to Johanna Jacoba Van Der Groef and to her two sons there in the United States , in their rather turbulent lives .........