I have a lot of questions about the likelihood that Hendrik Takel Ouderkirk and Eve Bowden were the parents of Laney and James Ouderkirk and will provide my thoughts as I spent years on the journey of trying to discover information about the elusive Eve.

According to information in both The Ouderkerk Family Genealogy, Vol II (H. John Ouderkirk and Raymond D. Ouderkirk) and A Dutch Cooper’s Legacy: An Ouderkirk Story From 1660 (Shirley Forth), Henry married Eve Bowden, a widow with two young sons, Thomas and Henry. Her maiden name was recorded as Dengur. As I believe it was Shirley who provided the information to the authors of the Ouderkerk Genealogy, one source does not really corroborate the other. Shirley provided few footnotes and sources in her book and so I have never been able to determine how she discovered this relationship. It may well have been on one of her visits to Eastern Ontario as she did most of her research by visiting places and writing to people.

In The Ouderkerk Family Genealogy, Vol II, Eve was recorded as born September 9, 1785 and died November 25, 1858. I have searched the church records for Dundas County and have found no records at all for a birth or marriage of Eve Dengur. I also searched New York records for the same and have found nothing to date. BUT there must be something out there that is not online that Shirley found that lead her to the existence of Eve!

Henry and Eve were assumed to have been married about 1822 based likely on the death date of Henry’s first wife, Magdalena, in April of 1821, and the birth of Henry and Eve’s first child. Shirley recorded the children of Henry and Eve as Laney Ouderkirk, born December 24, 1822, James Ouderkirk, born January 25, 1828, and David Ouderkirk, all in Williamsburg Township, Dundas County, Upper Canada. David was simply recorded as having died young. I have been able to locate no baptismal records for any of these children to support these birth dates and locations.

At some point in the 1840’s, it is believed that Henry and Eve and their children, Laney and James, moved to the Markham area. According to Brown’s Toronto City and Home District Directory 1846-7, a Henry Oadakirk (sic) was farming Lot 8 Con II in Markham Township. Laney Ouderkirk married Thomas Joseph Jobbitt, a shoemaker, on April 17, 1845, in Markham Township and James Ouderkirk married Mary Parfit on January 19, 1952, in Markham Township. Laney's family remained in the Markham Township area.  Laney Jobbitt died April 26, 1885 in Uxbridge according to the Uxbridge Times Journal.

At this point, the question really needs to be asked – were these children Hendrik Takel Ouderkirk’s children or did they belong to some other Henry Ouderkirk and Eve? There is a headstone for Eve in the Headford United Church Cemetery in what is now Richmond Hill. It is nestled between headstones for two Jobbitt children, William Henry who died in 1859 and Isaiah who died in 1873. The headstones were previously broken and flat on the ground, but a cemetery project a number of years ago undertook to repair and raise the headstones which are now upright but very difficult to read.

On Eve’s headstone, it says that she died in 1858. This does present a problem as there is a marriage record for Hendrik Takel Ouderkirk and Sarah Eliza Casselman who married on August 14, 1849, in Madrid, New York. 

I have considered a few different possibilities here – there may be more! The truth is out there somewhere. Divorce was not part of everyday life in the early 1800’s and it seems unlikely that Henry simply deserted Eve. Perhaps Henry was NOT the father of Laney and James, though they both did carry the Ouderkirk name and James and his family lived in Bracebridge from at least 1879 to 1886, at the same time Henry was living here.

James was a builder of Dutch-style barns and moved from town to town, resulting in a variety of birthplaces for his children. On the 1871 Census, he was registered as a carpenter in Tweed. The 1879 death certificate of his son, James Archibald, recorded him as a carpenter living in Bracebridge. This is confirmed on the 1881 Census for Bracebridge and James was documented in the 1886 City Directory for the town of Bracebridge. 

In the Northern Advance newspaper on September 17, 1885, James Ouderkirk was recorded as the prosecutor of two men, James Mitchell and Thomas Duncan, who were fined for their activities by James Boyer. It does appear as though James was a constable at that time.

All of this evidence does not prove that Hendrik Takel Ouderkirk was the father of Laney and James. They could well have been cousins – though I have not found any cousin of Henry who was also named Henry who could have married Eve and fathered these two children. But the possibility does exist.

In Shirley Forth’s book, she noted that Henry Ouderkirk of Uxbridge was named as a member of the General Committee planning a celebration in Toronto in 1884 to honour the United Empire Loyalists. Shirley acknowledged that this was curious as Henry was not a UEL, although two of his wives were from families of Loyalists. She remarked that he was quite capable for a man of 86. I think this may lend fodder to the idea that Henry Ouderkirk of the Markham/Uxbridge area was NOT Hendrik Takel Ouderkirk.

At the beginning of my journey, I thought it was possible that Eve did not die in 1858 as recorded on her headstone. I thought she actually may have died earlier, say in 1848, and the headstone was carved much later as a memorial to her. I do wonder, then, why a stone hadn’t been erected for her in Buttonville, where another grandson, James Jobbitt, was buried in 1851.

However, there still are problems with the dates on the headstone for me. IF the headstone is correct and Eve was 73 years, 2 months and 16 days old on November 25, 1858, that calculates to a birth year of 1785. This means that Eve would have been 37 when Laney was born and 42 when James was born – not unheard of at that time. IF, however, we consider that Eve may have died in 1848, that would calculate to a birth year of 1775 and would have made her 47 and 52 when Laney and James were born – much less likely. So, it is very difficult to reconcile the data on the headstone with what we know of Eve’s family.