Working with sources is always a tricky business. No source is truly straightforward, and even when an author in advance admits a certain bias, his or her interpretation of events or look into the past may be coloured in very different shades. But I do not intend to talk about the way in which the individual perception of the creator of a source colours that source, but about the opposite: how the view of a historian colours their interpretation of the source.
Sources come in many different forms, and even administrative documents, which may seem simple, can be misleading and ambiguous. They hint at a stable and consistent collection of data. Very often, this is not the case. In the past half year I’ve been working on transcribing a collection of municipal registers kept in the provincial archives of Limburg in Maastricht. The registers date from 1777, when the council of Maastricht decided to make a survey of all inhabitants and property in the town. Fourteen registers were once in existence, four have survived to this day. These registers would not have covered all of the city – for example, one entry remarks on a citizen moving to the neighbourhood SS – Sint Servaas. Yet, as a look at the list of 14 neighbourhoods or wijken makes clear, there is no Sint Servaas wijk listed there. This is because the territory of the church of St Servaas was considered an independent political entity within the city.
These registers list a variety of information on people. It is enough to make you curious about their exact circumstances, and sometimes people appear and reappear before disappearing forever in the fog of history. Possibly for some their entry in the register is the only memory left of their name. It becomes increasingly tempting to imagine what these individuals were up to. Let me illustrate this with a single example:
Marcus Kaigi with his wife and four children only makes an appearance in the register for wijk A, Wittevrouwewijk. He makes a grand total of four appearances because he moved often. We do not know where he came from, not even in general, but he seems to have been an immigrant into the city, because the register notes his admission is valid as long as his job is ongoing. His wife and children were probably immigrants as well, or these terms would have been more lenient. Nevertheless, despite the apparently strict regulation to his stay, he lived in the city for at least two years, and when he moved out of wijk A, he was moving into a property in another neighbourhood of the city. Perhaps he stayed in the city for many years after.
The entries regarding him are in the wrong order, because they are organised topographically rather than chronologically. They are as follows:
Capucijnenstraat [house number/name/job/where from/when/when and where to did he leave]
246 / Marcus Kaigi vrouw en 4 kinderen / adm. voor lang werck Bijcoop / uyt no 270 litt A. / 10 feb 1781 / 24 feb 1781 nae no 256 l[ittera] A
256 / Marcus Kaigi vrouw 4 kinders / Adm. voor lang werck voor de comp. / uyt no 246 Litt A /1781 24 let A / 22 meij 1782 nae no 122 litt E
Hoogfrankrijk
269 / Marcus Kaigi, vrouw en vier kinders / Werck op het landswerck / Met admissie voor een jaar uyt [doorgestreept] / Per 20 meij 1779 /29 meij 1780 nae no 270 litt A
270 / Marcus Kaigi, vrouw & 4 kinders / Werck op het landswerck / Met naeder adm. voor soolang arbeit bij de comp. / 29 meij 1780 uyt no 269 litt A / 10 feb 1781 nae no 256 litt A
So, in May 1779 Kaigi moved into house number 269 in the street called Hoogfrankrijk. Because someone crossed out part of the entry relating to his place of origin, it is unclear whether he came from a house in Maastricht or from outside, but his immigrant status is clear from the special admission remarked upon (‘met admissie voor een jaar’ = with admission for one year). Almost exactly a year later, in may 1780, he moved into the house next door, number 270. His employment was the same, the phrasing ‘naeder adm. voor soolang arbeit’ makes clear his stay had been extended so long as this employment lasted. He lived in his house, with his wife and four children, until February 1781. Then, he moved to the Capucijnenstraat number 246, which may have been upmarket compared to his initial habitation. Yet he stayed for less than a month and at the end of February moved into Capucijnenstraat 256. In May 1782, more than a year later, he moved away to a different neighbourhood, the St Nicholas quarter. Because of the nature of the registers it is impossible to trace what street he moved to, or how long he stayed there. He makes no further appearances in our sources.
What can we do with this information? It is perhaps tempting to try and reconstruct his life. What was the standard of living of him and his family? The four children seem to have survived for the duration, which might mean that they were no infants, who had a much higher mortality rate. His position as immigrant makes it likely he was not rich, because usually only the poor went in search of labour elsewhere. This seems to be borne out by his job: I’m not sure about this, but field work for the company may well have been manual labour, such as construction on the fortifications. On the other hand, he was married. This was in a time when marriage was a sign of financial independence. Is it possible to take an even closer look at this aspect of the family’s life?
One way is by comparing the other people who rented the houses he lived in. We do have information on this. At Hoogfrankrijk 269, the inhabitant prior to him moving in was clearly not very well off. After all, the entry regarding Willem Keerskens lists his employment as ‘Gaat sijn brood vragen en is blind’ – begs for food and is blind. But after he left, people with respectable professions moved in, such as a cobbler, a master smith and a roof-tiler. The initial poor inhabitant may be explained by charity, ie an allowance from a certain church paying his rent. At Hoogfrankrijk 270, other occupants include a tailor’s apprentice, a ‘wachtmeester’ of the dragoons, and another man who worked at the ‘lands werk’. None of these lived there at the same time, they rented the house consecutively. I have not yet located the exact house, but the map below reveals that the space of each of the houses in the Hoogfrankrijk street were small, although they also each had a garden.
When he moved to house 246 in 1781 he moved into a property previously inhabited by a bartender, the bartender’s widow, and a man who kept ‘beesten’, animals. This means the house must have possessed a sizeable garden, except if the animals were held on separate property elsewhere – which would still imply that the inhabitant was not poor. At 256 previous and later inhabitants include a military engineer, a soldier, a gardener and a shopkeeper. Professions that are not generally more affluent than those at 269. Furthermore, topographically speaking the houses at the Capucijnenstraat were not similar in size. Some of there were considerably larger than those at Hoogfrankrijk, but others were the same size or even smaller. Until we have identified the specific housing Kaigi and his family lived in (which may happen some time later) it’s impossible to say whether he moved into more sizeable property.
That is, I think, as far as I can go with this particular source with regard to this particular subject: the life and times of Marcus Kaigi. I cannot prove he moved up from a poor house to a slightly more upmarket home. The people we come across as living in that same house sooner or later than the Kaigi family cannot be examined by wealth, at least not using this particular source. As such, the reason for leaving cannot be explained. The idea that the family moved to acquire a better quality home is just one of many possible explanations. Proximity to family or friends may apply, for example, as would rising rent prices or even eviction. As such, our findings must be limited to objectively stating where Marcus Kaigi, his wife and his four children lived during a few years of their life. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting to think about it!
The habitat of Marcus Kaigi and his family. Hoogfrankrijk (vertical) and a part of the Capucijnenstraat (horizontal). Note how Hoogfrankrijk is very close to the (now demolished) medieval city wall, what is presently the Herbenusstraat.
