De Jong

What De Jong means

De Jong began as a distinguishing nickname rather than a family name. When two men shared a first name in a village — two Pieter Janssens, for instance — they were told apart by age: one became De Jonge, the young one, and the other De Oude, the old one. Over generations, the nickname attached itself to the younger man's descendants and solidified into a hereditary surname.

The surname is spelled with a capital D in Dutch when used without a first name — De Jong — following Dutch orthographic convention. With a first name it is written lowercase: Jan de Jong. This convention trips up genealogists searching in English databases, which often strip or misfile the prefix.

Napoleon and the Dutch surname law

Most Dutch surnames were not fixed until 1811, when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered a census requiring all inhabitants of the French Empire — which then included the Netherlands — to adopt permanent hereditary family names. Before that, most Dutch people used patronymics: the son of Jan was Jan Jansen; his son was Pieter Pietersen; his daughter was Maria Pieters. The name changed every generation.

When the law was enforced, families chose or were assigned surnames. De Jong was among the most commonly adopted, either because it described the family's position in the community or because officials assigned it to younger members of large families. In some Dutch lore, families deliberately chose undignified or comic names to mock what they saw as a French imposition — but De Jong was a straightforward choice that carried no such irony.

De Jong in the diaspora

Dutch emigration to North America began in the 17th century, when New Amsterdam (now New York) was founded by the Dutch West India Company in 1626. Early settlers — Stuyvesant, Van Rensselaer, Roosevelt — established Dutch names in the colonial record. De Jong arrived in significant numbers later, during the great 19th and 20th century emigration waves, particularly to Michigan, Iowa, and the Netherlands communities of the American Midwest.

In South Africa, Dutch settlement dates from 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck established a provisioning station at the Cape for the Dutch East India Company. Afrikaner family names — De Jong among them — carry this 17th-century Dutch lineage forward. Many South African De Jongs descend from those original settlers, making Afrikaner genealogy one of the best-documented in the world through the archives of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Researching De Jong ancestry

Dutch genealogical records are among the most comprehensive in the world. The Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie (CBG) in The Hague holds millions of records, and the majority are freely searchable through WieWasWie.nl — the central Dutch genealogy database. Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths began in 1811 with the Napoleonic census; Catholic and Protestant church registers survive in many cases from the 17th century.

For De Jong researchers with South African roots, the Genealogical Society of South Africa and the Cape Town Archives hold the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) records that document the early Cape families. For Dutch-Americans, the Holland Society of New York maintains records of early Dutch colonial families in America.