In brief

Who were my ancestors? Who was their first forefather? Who were the first Kingmas? Where did they live? What did they do? Where does the name Kingma come from? How did Kingma State come into being?

At some point in their life, everyone starts taking an interest in their origins, the roots of their family.

What do we know about the origins of the Kingma family?

In our quest for our ancestors, we found a man by the name of Jelle, the earliest Kingma we know of. He was born around 1450 in the part of Friesland then known as Westergo. The capital of that region was Franeker. Jelle lived on a farm, or sate in Frisian, known as Kinghum, three kilometres east of Franeker, on the road to Leeuwarden. The sate stood on an old terp (dwelling mound), one of four named terps (Edum, Sjaarda, Salverd and Kinghum) on the salt-marsh ridge along the Salverderweg. Test drilling in 2009 on the site of the terp, dug away in the 19th century, turned up pottery from the late Iron Age or from the 7th to 9th century; how old the habitation of Kinghum itself is, we do not know (see How the estate began). Nor do we know whether his parents already lived there. Close by, the towing canal connecting the two towns was dug in 1507-1508.

Jelle did not own the whole sate. In 1511 his son Pieter farmed it and paid rent to his father and mother, to a priest in Franeker and to Gerrolt van Herema, whose wife had inherited a share of the sate. Only around the middle of the sixteenth century are the Kingums recorded as eigenerfden, farmers on their own land: in 1552 Pieter represented Franekeradeel as an eigenerfde in the diet, the assembly of the States of Friesland.

Whoever lived at Kinghum was named after the place. In the tax registers of 1511 and 1514, Jelle and his son Pieter are called ‘Kenghum’ and ‘Kinggema’, among other forms; later Kingum and Kinguma occur, and the deed of sale of the state of 1611 has Kingma. What the name Kinghum itself means is unknown. The ending -um means dwelling place; the old family explanation, a house by a kink (a sharp bend) in the road, is unlikely according to the 2026 research into the name (see Where the name comes from).

Six generations of this Kingma family lived on the sate. Initially, they were tenant farmers, but through hard work, advantageous marriages and substantial land purchases, the Kingmas climbed the social ladder and acquired quite some prestige in the province of Friesland. The sate became a prominent state (a Frisian manor house), known as Kingma State, with voting rights in the provincial government.

The last Kingma to live at the state was Ignatius van Kingma (1621-1700). He pursued a military career and reached the rank of colonel with his own cavalry regiment. His regiment belonged to the States Army, the army of the Dutch Republic, and fought in the Disaster Year of 1672. His tombstone also calls him brigadier, the title of a colonel who commanded several regiments in wartime. After him the state passed to his nephew Zacheus van Ghemmenich, his sister’s son; Zacheus’s daughter Petronella still lived there in 1753. After that, Kingma State remained with the Van Beijma (thoe Kingma) family until 1864.

The Kingma family bore its own coat of arms.

Originally, the Kingma coat of arms consisted of an escutcheon party per fess, featuring two conch shells sable (kinkhoorns) on argent as the upper field and an arrow argent on azure as the base field, with a swan crest. Later a third field was added with the Frisian half eagle, which many Frisian families bore in their arms. The sources explain the origin of that eagle in different ways; see The family coat of arms.

Whether the conch shells in the coat of arms have anything to do with the name, we do not know; perhaps the family chose them to depict its name. A kinkhoorn is a twisted, spiral shell.