Anna van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk

Anna van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk (1 December 1640 – ) and her sisters are particularly known for joining Jean de Labadie and the house congregation of the Labadists in 1669, offering them housing and setting up a community in Wieuwerd in Friesland in 1675. Early life and family Anna grew up on Lange Voorhout in The Hague as one of sixteen children of a very wealthy and strictly Reformed regent/governor family. She was the daughter of Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk (1600-1662) and Lucia van Walta (1610-1674). Life In 1669 Anna van Aerssen and her sisters Maria and Lucia joined the separatist house church of the recently deposed minister Jean de Labadie. According to Mirjam de Baar, they probably got to know him through their friend Anna Maria van Schurman when he was still pastor of the Walloon congregation in Middelburg. There they will have regularly visited the services led by him. In 1670 Anna van Aerssen left Amsterdam with her brothers- and sisters of faith to Herford in Germany, where Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate (1618-1680) received the Labadists. In 1672 the group moved to Altona (then in Denmark, now a suburb of Hamburg). The Labadists It was thanks to the Van Aerssen family that the followers of Jean de Labadie were able to settle in Wieuwerd in the summer of 1675. Via Lucia (Luts) van Walta, Anna's mother, the castle Walta - also called Thetinga-state - came into the hands of the family. After the death of Luts van Walta in June 1674, the seigniority, with all 'subordinate houses, gates, courts, canals, trees and plantations', as well as various farms, passed to son Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk (1637-1688), who gave Walta state in return for payment of ninety thousand guilders to his three unmarried sisters. In turn, the sisters gave the Labadists the opportunity to settle in Walta state.