off to the Netherlands

While obsessing with various migration stories in my distant family history, including the 19th century departures to the Black Sea and to Brazil, I neglected one example much closer to the present. In 1910, the oldest sister of my great-grandfather Julius (about to set up his own shop in Luisenthal) emigrated to the Netherlands with her husband who hailed from Barmen and with her three children who were all born in Krefeld.

There is some info about these people on Dutch archive sites, so let's add some flesh to the bones I had in the ancient Krefeld clan entry:

7. Karl Düselmann ~ 11.3.1841 Krefeld
oo (2) Elisabeth Catharina Imig (1851-1924)
7.2. Elisabeth (Elise) * 9.8.1876 Krefeld, +19.06.1945 Bergen, NL (I saw her referred to as a student of theology in one of the archive entries, but after finding other errors there as well, I am beginning to think that this may have been a mix-up with info referring to her son? Would be quite something if true though.)
oo Otto Finkensieper * 4.11.1871 Barmen + 2.8.1930 Alkmaar NL, aged 58, furniture trader,

7.2.1. Karl Otto * 8.11.1905 Krefeld +9.11.1960 Valburg, NL, writer, priest in Zetten (biography in Dutch), photo
oo 20.10.1932 Johanna Koning, * 10.1.1911 Meppel
7.2.2. Hugo Kurt * 10.7.1907 Krefeld, merchant in Scheveningen; received the Orde van Oranje-Nassau in Silver
oo 5.5.1931 Bergen Elisabeth Wilhelmina Kerkmeer, born 17.4.1907 in Alkmaar, 24 years old
7.2.3. Benjamin 15.2.1909 Krefeld merchant in Scheveningen
oo Augusta Matthilde Dahlhaus

Cover of the book Holland zoo ben je (1934),
to which Karl Otto Finkensieper contributed two novellas: Waterpost and Nieuw land.

As far as I know nobody in my family was in contact with the Dutch relatives after 1945. From my grandmother I had the names of the three brothers and their career choices, but that's as far as the info went. (Sounds like the families kept in touch while the Düsselmanns still were in the Lower Rhine area, but lost touch when they moved to East Prussia.) The names of their wives are from the Dutch archives website.

I didn't find any children of the three couples but I'm spooked by the discovery that there was a scandal at the Heldring-Gestichten in Zetten in the 1980s where a psychiatrist called Theo Finkensieper was the culprit (sentenced in 1992 according to Dutch wikipedia) Unfortunately, Karl Otto Finkensieper was the director of this very same institution from 1939 until his death in 1960, and I think this documentary says (at 2:20 mins) that Theo was his son. As far as I understood from the Dutch commentary, the place was known for very strict protestant morals until 1960 (when Karl Otto died), and the liberation beginning the 1960s may have led to transgressions that ended up in abuse cases.

This obviously swamps all the searches and I didn't look further for descendants, because even if I could find them I guess they wouldn't want to have their family relations publicised.

On the migration theme, in March 1930 Benjamin travelled to New York on the ship Nieuw Amsterdam, and after that I can find no further register entries in NL that mention him (apart from his father's death where he and his wife are mistakenly labelled as parents of the deceased, which doesn't really inspire confidence in these archive records). So did he emigrate??? It's a bit tricky to investigate as he shares his name with an architect who built lots of things in New York a generation earlier, around 1900. So that's all I can find right now.

Regarding the origins of the name Finkensieper, there is a hamlet and a creek called Finkensiepen which are today part of the town of Radevormwald, Oberbergischer Kreis, NRW. This would be plausible, especially as Gedbas has a bunch of Finkensieper children born in Radevormwald around 1770. Etymologically, this seems to have the same roots as Siepmann, which I've pinned down to Schwelm, which is in Westphalia but not all that far away.