Karl Wesling, a member of the Genealogical Society for Family History in Bremen, which is commonly referred to as The Mouse or Die Maus, contacted me and would later discover that Laurens HEIJNEKEN had actually been baptized as Laurentz HEINEKEN.  A copy of an indexed document, extracted from the January 2, 1719 entry of Laurentz’s birth within the church book of the Unser Lieben Frauen (ULF) Church in Bremen, along with a copy of that church book page, serves as evidence.  These two documents revealed that Laurentz's parents were Johan HEINEKEN and Magdalena TER STEGEN.

Furthermore, within the archived ULF church records, Karl discovered that Laurentz had an elder sister and two older brothers: Anna Catharina, born in 1710, Simon Johan, born in 1712, and Gottfriedt, born in 1715.  All four were the children of Johan and Magdalena.  Though this, by itself, was very good news, it became even more intriguing because some of the godparents present at Anna Catharina's and Simon Johan's christenings were related to a Johann HEINEKEN, a merchant, who was a documented member of a HEINEKEN line in Bremen referred to as the Mayor's Branch.

The godparents mentioned were Johann's sister, Anna Catharina, along with Johan LOHMANN, Brüning TIMMERMANN and Ebelke EYBEN.  It was already known that Johan, Brüning and Ebelke were the respective spouses of Helena HEINEKEN, Catharina HEINEKEN and Dirich HEINEKEN, who were siblings of Johann and Anna Catharina HEINEKEN.  Naturally, it then became necessary to find out the relationship between Johann HEINEKEN, the merchant, and the other Johan Heineken, the father of Laurentz Heineken.

{The designation of the Mayor's Branch was bestowed upon this family because Christian Abraham Heineken (1752-1818) had been a mayor of Bremen and had been highly regarded and respected for his mayoral and genealogical work.  As such, the Mayor's Branch family tree had already been researched prior to my search in Bremen, especially as it relates to the older generations of the family, and, in no small part, due to the efforts of the Bremen Mayor himself.  Christian Abraham's paternal great-grandparents were Johann HEINEKEN, the merchant, and Anna Catharina GRAVERS, who were married in 1692 in Wesel, Germany.  Johann and Anna Catharina were the parents of Christian (Jean) Abraham, who had been born in 1695 and who would later move to Magdeburg and become its mayor.  The couple also had a daughter born in Wesel, yet her first name, at this point in time, isn't known.  Johann had been married twice in his lifetime, and although the name of his other wife hadn't been known either, it was accepted that this union produced a son named Peter HEINEKEN.}

Naturally, from a genealogical perspective, the first priority had been to locate where and when Lauren's parents had been married, but that tiny bit of information eluded me for several months.  (I finally found a source to their marriage while exploring the on-line, trial version web site of the Mormon's Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and it was then that all of the missing pieces began to fall rapidly into place.)  

It was discovered that Johann and Anna Catharina were present in Moers, Germany, a city located, roughly, 20 miles south of Wesel.  Written records from Moers documented that they were the parents of two boys, Bernhardus and Diterich, who were born, respectively, in 1700 and in 1702.  Anna Catharina's death certificate, which was also uncovered in Moers (in early 2000--nearly 300 years later), had been recorded in 1703.  It was there again, less than two years later, that a marriage had taken place whereby a Johan HEINEKEN, who was noted as a widower on the marriage certificate, had married Magdalena TERSTEGEN.  (The mayor of Moers, Sebastian Erkenswick, had been present as a witness to this marriage.  This fact is included as we now have a third mayor mentioned on this page, and because "an apple does not fall far from the tree.")  There had been two other children born to Johan and Magdalena: Agneta Magdalena, born in late 1705, and, not too surprisingly, a Pieter Thomas HEINEKEN, born in 1707.  It bears mentioning, here, that all of the new information came from the archives of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Moers, and most of this information may also be verified at the LDS's web site. 

By searching the on-line genealogical web site of the LDS, ordering archived microfiche documents through my local LDS Family History Center, and Karl's interim coordination and personal telephone calls to the German archives in Wesel and in Moers (which resulted in some duplication of records), information had been slowly gathered that finally connected the Dordrecht HENNEKES family to the Mayor's Branch.  A senior researcher at the Genealogical Society for Family History in Bremen examined all of the new evidence (personally presented by Karl Wesling) and determined that Johann HEINEKEN's second wife was, indeed, Magdalena TER STEGEN.  

A brief summary of these findings were published in "Missing Links", an on-line genealogical journal, which was affiliated with RootsWeb at that particular point of time.  It was published on June 21, 2000 and titled: "Successful Links: Grafting a Dutch Branch onto a German Tree".  Petunia Press is now the sole publisher of Missing Links, and they have a link to download back issues of Missing Links on the main page.  Please visit Petunia Press and subscribe to Missing Links and their other electronic magazine (e-zine), Somebody's Links.  The subscriptions are free.

This story had to be told for several reasons.  Without the research, we wouldn't have discovered some of the missing pieces of the Mayor's Branch; specifically, that Johann HEINEKEN and Ann Catharina GRAVERS had left Wesel and ended up in Moers, that they had had two other sons born to them there, that Anna Catharina had eventually died in Moers, that Johann, the merchant, had later remarried in Moers as Johan, the widower, and that his second wife had actually been Magdalena TER STEGEN.

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