Maria van Oosterwijck, Part 2

She was born under humble conditions in a small village called Nootdorp, just east of Delft. Indeed her name reflects the location. In Dutch, van means "of the", or "belonging to". The word oost means "east" and wijck means "district", so she is literally Maria of the Eastern District.

Nootdorp municipality atlas
c. 1869
by J. Kuyper

This map, although published in 1869, shows the relationship between the two communities. The boundary of Delft can be seen in the lower left corner of the image.

Maria van Oosterwijck's father, and his father before him, were Protestant preachers in the village. Her father became a preacher -- predicant in Dutch -- in 1623, the same year he married Maria's mother.

According to research performed by Frans van Popel, using demographic information collected by the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague, life expectancy in the early decades of the 17th century was less than 40 years. This was a time of war and plague cycles, hence high mortality rates. 

Maria van Oosterwijck's mother died at age 36, when Maria was six years old. Her parents -- Jacobus van Oosterwijck and Adriana Lambrechtsdr van Linschoten -- had six children between 1624 and 1636. Three of them died in infancy.

Plague warning
by Dr Johan van Beverwijck
Dordrecht 1636

Of those, their first child died at birth; another, the third born, died almost exactly nine months before Maria was born; and the sixth died in 1636, at the same time as Maria's mother. This must have been a traumatic childhood experience, as Maria and her older sister Geertruyt likely would have been called upon to care for their surviving two year old brother, Lambertus, while their father personally grieved and professionally counted the dead.

It is certain that others  -- friends, neighbors and extended family -- died the same year as Maria's mother and brother because plague was sweeping across the region. In 1635, about 20,000 people in Leiden died from it.

Leiden, which is less than 15 miles away from Delft, was part of an interconnected system of trade. Textiles, Delftware and other products were transported along the canal system linking Holland to the outside world. Trade, the lifeblood of the region, also brought the viral death knell of plague.

A Dutch physician by the name of Isbrand van Diemerbroeck reported cases of measles, small pox, dysentery and spotted fever in the countryside along with the plague, all of which spread swiftly between March and August 1636. According to Daniel Curtis of Leiden University, over 400 burials on average were recorded in each community in Zuid-Holland that year.

What's more, the van Oosterwijck family's loss of mother and youngest child in 1636 was coupled with a move from Nootdorp to Voorburg, another small village, this time near Den Haag (The Hague) about five miles away.

tax receipt,
Old Archive city council Delft
c. 1632

The move may have been predicated by a financial burden. According to the archives in Delft, Jacobus van Oosterwijck, "preacher to Nootdorp" was "caught in the tax on real estate" some time after 1632. The sum was 12 guilders, or nearly $200.00 US today. For a small town preacher, this was likely an exorbitant amount of money.

In any event, some time immediately prior to the deaths of Maria's mother and brother, the family picked up and moved out of Nootdorp.

The village Voorburg was familiar to the van Oosterwijck family. Maria's grandfather Jan Barentsz van Oosterwijck had been born there in 1556, before relocating to Delft some time before 1609.

We may never know if Maria wanted to move, or had any thoughts about it after it happened but certainly these events attest to a series of traumas that marked her earliest years.