Sometimes they came from far and wide. Poor and often single mothers at the end of their rope. They saw no other way out than to abandon their children on the doorstep of the Amsterdam Almoezeniers' orphanage. The moving exhibition about this orphanage and its residents can now be seen in the City Archives.
Abel Doesn't know. This is the name of a baby from 1791. The boy is only a few hours old when an Amsterdam city guard finds him crying in the street, wrapped in cloths. The city guard takes the foundling to the Almoezeniers orphanage, where the child is given clothes and this uninspired last name.
Abel is one of the many hundreds of children who ended up in the enormous Almoezeniers' orphanage every year. The income disparities between rich and poor had widened sharply by the end of the eighteenth century and there was a lot of unemployment and poverty. When the father passed away, the rest of the family quickly became beggars. In extreme need, mothers left their children near the Aalmoezeniers' orphanage, the city orphanage for foundlings and the poorest children. Orphans of Amsterdam parents who could afford citizenship or were members of a church ended up in other, smaller orphanages.
Cry from the heart
The foundlings, and they weren't just babies, sometimes carried a note with their first name on it. It was an offense to abandon your child, so the parents did not write their own names. Sometimes the note also contained a heartfelt cry from the mother. For example, that she would come and pick up the child again in better times. “Children were rarely picked up again. They also never got to see the notes, although that could have offered them something of comfort,” explains guest curator Nanda Geuzebroek. She did the research for the exhibition Vondelingen in the Amsterdam City Archives.
Information about the children found, such as the location and clothing, and any notes have been preserved in the collection books of the Aalmoezeniers orphanage. Geuzebroek started her research with Abel Weetniet:“The intake books are thin at the top and thick at the bottom, because of all the notes that are stuck with them. Each child had its own page and Abel's was almost completely blank. No note, no information, nothing at all. That was heartbreaking.”
Maternal love
Most of the babies found soon died. Mothers generally did not want to part with their children at all and only abandoned them when they were already malnourished and severely weakened. If they had also been outside for a few hours, the little ones would be in bad shape, especially in winter. Once found and washed and registered in the orphanage, a nurse was given the baby to take home. She breastfed the baby or porridge. A baby's intestinal system could not handle the latter at all, and most children did not survive their first year.
Cornelis van Vollenhoven, director of the Aalmoezeniers orphanage, had started following the lives of the foundlings registered that year in 1792. The death rates were very high:of the 352 children born in 1792, only 71 would be alive in 1814. The doctor Christiaan Nieuwenhuijs used these results to show that the Aalmoezeniers orphanage as an institution was not good. And the minuses came off completely bad for him. Two-thirds of these children had already died with their nurse, and according to Nieuwenhuijs that was due to the poor care. Since then, minuses have had a bad reputation.
Topminds
Geuzebroek has researched the minuses and found out that this negative image of the minus is often unjustified. Take for example Angenietje Swarthof. This widow was especially good at taking care of the weakest, who were already certain they would not make it. She has taken care of 134 children, the majority of whom - 90 children - died. These sad circumstances did not stop Angenietje from taking in foundling children for thirty years. With the help of her eldest daughter, she sometimes cared for as many as eight children at a time. “These kinds of top women actually did end-of-life care. They ensured that the severely weakened children still had a good end,” says Geuzebroek.
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Minuses were often women from poor families, who could really use the allowance for taking care of small children. Still, Geuzebroek has regularly found signs of affection. “Founded children often kept in touch with their loved ones when they lived in the Almoezeniers' orphanage and would visit them on Sundays. I also found in official sources, where the names of the parents were asked, foundlings who then gave the names of their foster parents. Like Pieter van Koot, when he enlisted in the army. Even though it had been years since he had lived with them.”
The big house
Children who could be repaired by the nurse stayed in the family until they were four. Then they had to go to the Almoezeniers orphanage. They ended up in a huge building – along with several thousand children – where they were checked for scabies and lice, and where they were given their uniforms. The small children lived together in the Children's Home, a separate part of the orphanage. As teenagers, the boys and girls lived separately in the Grootkinderhuis. The children went to school during the week and learned a trade when they were a bit older. They were free on Sunday.
Personal attention was impossible with so many children and it is not difficult to imagine how traumatic the childhood of these children was. Despite the strict regime and the lack of nutritious food, the regents had the best intentions for the foundlings, according to the sources. For example, they were very strict in selecting the minuses, although there was a great shortage of them. Geuzebroek:“They checked the lovers twice a year at unexpected moments, so that the lovers could not warn each other. More than half of the minuses were only assigned a child once, and I think that's because the regents didn't think they were good enough anyway."
Way to work
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the malaise was great in the Netherlands. More and more parents abandoned their children, with peaks such as 769 foundlings in the famine year 1817. The orphanage was bursting at the seams at that time and was short of money. One solution was to outsource older children:they went to live with farming families in the countryside, helped on the farm and also strengthened.
Sometimes things didn't end well:factory owners preyed on the foundlings, who were cheap workers. They subsequently failed to fulfill the promise to teach the children a trade. Gerrit Jan ter Hoeven, a factory director in Rotterdam, made the most of it. He exploited the 215 foundlings that had been outsourced to him. They had to work long hours in poor conditions, with spoiled food, beatings and no education. After some children had died, inspectors started to take a closer look. Tears welled up in their eyes when they saw the neglected and apathetic children.
Jacoba Mout was also an outsourced child. Jacoba and her sister Anna were found as a toddler and toddler near a beer cellar, hence their last name. Geuzebroek:“They only grew up together for a few years. The regents had no problem separating relatives from each other. We look at it very differently now.” To save the Almoezeniers orphanage money, Jacoba had to go to Enschede as an eight-year-old to learn how to spin. Fortunately, once grown, the girls found each other again.
Backlog
These children at the bottom of society have never had a voice in history themselves. Not one foundling from that time has put anything on paper, so we don't know how they experienced their childhood. How the farewell of the nurse was for them and how they felt, as one of the many in that massive orphanage. We only find them in official documents, such as marriage and funeral records, or when they had to register for their military service. “The intake books, with those notes from mothers with broken hearts, are one of the few sources in which poor people do have a voice and therefore also one of the most moving sources in the archive,” says Geuzebroek.
She has also conducted research into the further life course of foundlings, once they have left the orphanage as adults. "Life was hard enough in those days and these children were also at a considerable disadvantage." Foundlings were on the lowest rung of the social ladder and a social climb was rare. Discrimination and exploitation did, and foundlings had no family network they could fall back on if things weren't going well.
Unlike the majority of the foundlings, Abel Weet niet would end up well. At the age of eighteen he left the Almoezeniers orphanage and had to be employed. At that time, the French were in charge here and Abel joined Napoleon's army. He survived five years of service and became a corporal. Back in Amsterdam he started working as a painter, he married the young Joanna and they had no fewer than eight children together. He would eventually make it to civil servant on the Wadden Islands. His only grandson would not have a son himself, with which the name Weetniet died out.