Love of Family History
J.S. Bach's genealogy, Peter Hettinga's prayer, and a holiday challenge
For several generations preceding its most well-remembered representative, the Bach family was cultivating the ideal environment and opportunities for their children to succeed in music. Johann Sebastian (who went by his second name in his day) would show great interest in how they did this, creating a family genealogy titled “Origin of the Musical Bach Family,” with notes on 53 musical members of the family.
Throughout the genealogy, Sebastian—whose aversion to writing about himself has frustrated musicologists and biographers for hundreds of years—writes with clear devotion and even good humor about his family. While this incredible document is often mined only for the facts it can offer about Sebastian’s musical background and career, we can also learn from how he writes and from the simple fact that he was the kind of person to undertake such a history in the first place. His son Carl Philip Emmanuel would expand the record with similar affection, and it does not strike me as a record intended to help us appreciate or remember one particular member as much as to honor a rightly valued family legacy.
The document begins with Sebastian’s great-great grandfather “Veit Bach.” A bread baker who fled from Hungary to Thuringia because of his Lutheran faith, Veit began a centuries-long passion in his family through his hobby of strumming on his cittern wherever he went. Describing how he would play even amid the grinding of his mill, Sebastian says, “How pretty it must have sounded together! Yet in this way he had a chance to have time drilled into him.”1
As I study Bach’s genealogy, I think often about my own lineage and my dad’s special devotion to family history. The Hettingas (my father’s side) and the Geurinks (his mother’s) have lived together in central Wisconsin for generations, intertwined at multiple points like the Bachs and the Lemmerhirts (Sebastian’s mother’s family). My dad knows each living relation and has poured over historical accounts, reading aloud to us of war veterans, church plantings, and shipwrecks.
Hettinga is a very old Dutch name, with a coat of arms featuring three acorns. A reference to one Catharina Hettinga even showed up in Peter Wilson’s The Thirty Years War, which I read when studying the backdrop for Sebastian’s ancestors. The Hettingas to whom I can easily trace my lineage came to America from Friesland five generations ago. They were dairy farmers, making Wisconsin the perfect place to settle. “Paca” the patriarch and his wife had 18 children but went through the sorrow of losing six at early ages, leaving 12. If you know a Hettinga anywhere in America, I can text my dad and he will tell you to which of the “12 tribes” that person traces back. The branches are all mapped out in his head, and he loves calculating any Hettinga’s relation to my grandpa, himself, and me.
The oldest sibling of these 12 was named Andrew (also my older brother’s name) and we descended from the third-born, Peter (also my youngest brother’s name). The elder Peter had ten children of his own and delivered a beautiful prayer in Dutch at his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration. My father has read the translated prayer aloud on several occasions for our immediate and extended family, including my brother Peter’s baptism. The strong ideals of a family life of faith are astounding and are alive and well in our generations today. Here is an excerpt:
We need only to look around at the many healthy, happy faces of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and we cannot help but feel and say with them, “The Lord was with us.”
For fifty years their marriage boat rocked its way over life's sea. Many were the happy days of calm and quietness when the sea was smooth and they lived each other's love, but this was not always so.
Because of sin, they too were included, according to Thy Word, in the curse pronounced upon the earth: “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread and in sorrow shalt thou bear children.”
Eighteen children were born to them, of which six were taken back by Thee at a very early age. Many were the storms that beat upon their ship and sometimes caused them to cry out in fear, “Lord, help us or we perish!” Whereupon Thou didst hear their plea, and caused Thy voice to be heard saying to wind and waves, “Be still.”
It is a beautiful anchor of the soul to know that the sorrows of family life have been borne, and the joys of family celebrated, by one’s direct ancestors through the power of the same faith in God. Infant and child loss is a vital topic in my project on the Bach family, experienced by Sebastian, his ancestors, and his descendants. Peter Hettinga shares the song-filled response of subsequent generations:
Thou gavest us, one after another, a life partner with whom we in turn entered our own marriage boat and cast off on our own voyage over life’s seas, setting a course for that haven of heavenly rest.
O Lord, may we never try to weather life's treacherous sea in our own strength, but in all storms and distresses, with hope and trust, to fix our eyes upon our Pilot and Guide, Jesus Christ, always singing, with joy in our hearts:
Then although the waves stand high and wild The storm whips us along; We have the Father's Son aboard, Safe harbor is in sight.
There is a photo of four generations of our family which shows Paca, Peter, Raymond, and my grandpa’s older brother, Ray. I think of “Paca Hettinga” as our “Viet Bach” — a legend without whom we would not exist. My father spends time learning and passing on our family history not so that he can be remembered someday. Or even because he expects these generations must be recorded for the biography of one single great Hettinga. He cares just because he cares, and because it brings value to our lives and stability to our future generations to know our lineage.
In the same spirit, my mother has obtained written life stories from each of our grandparents and great-grandparents and put them together in printed binders for us her children. This history is a true gift and reminds me who I am amid various changes in life. We review these stories when we are together for the holidays, sometimes focusing on one patriarch or matriarch. I continue to learn, and newer members of the family become familiar with the family they have married into or been born into.
My father’s love for family history springs from his loving bond with his parents and siblings and a childhood about which he loves to reminisce. My care for our history continues in the same vein. One of the many insights that can be gained from Bach’s genealogical efforts, then, comes from reflecting that he had the desire to listen, and later to record and publish, the stories and details, both musical and familial, of the family in which he grew up.
I encourage you to pause and reflect on your family’s legacy. Do you know your great-grandparents’ names? What traditions and inclinations have been passed down? Which joys and hardships have cultivated your family’s ideals? As you gather with family for the holidays, come up with some questions you can ask the older generations or some stories you can share with the younger ones. With care, I am sure you will have some fruitful conversations and perhaps gain some new level of understanding and unity.
Wolff, Mendel, and David, The New Bach Reader