Van der Klein

My last name is a bit of a mystery. A distant cousin started a family tree several years ago and at some stage he got stuck, because our family name seems to have appeared out of nowhere. He could trace it back to somewhere in the late 19th century. There are plenty of Klein’s but ‘de Klein’ appears to be rare.

This made me wonder if perhaps my name is really ‘Klein’ and that it was changed throughout the decades to de Klein. It also made me wonder that maybe my origins are Jewish, Klein being a predominantly Jewish name.

I decided to see if I could find a mention of the name “de Klein” in the Dutch Jewish database ‘Joods Monument’. There was no reference of my family name. However there were 18 pages referring to the name Klein.

I also came across the name ‘van der Klein’ the…