Tracing My Roots

Family Legend, True or False? Part 4: Endings and Beginnings

2011-01-18T15:32:00.001+01:00

Last time I talked about what I’d found out about my grandfather (and grandmother) in relation to the research questions I had when going to the archive. But of course, there was a lot more in those files than I could have hoped for. A small summary of the information I found and the research questions it raised.

My grandfather’s childhood in Germany was completely unknown to me up until now. However, some light was shed on this by data provided by my grandfather about his schooling in Germany and the sketch L.J. van Aken made about the situation of the Polish immigrants in Bottrop in that time period.

My grandfather’s immigration is said by both him and L.J. van Aken to have been in 1928, when he was 14 or 15 years old (depending on which of the two are talking). This is a subject I’ve written about before here, here, and here. However, in spite of family stories that he came to the Netherlands when he was 16, I had only been able to find him coming into the country in 1932, at 17, or even later when he was 18. A puzzle to be sure and I want to check some last sources before coming to a final conclusion about this, although at the moment I am tempted to go with the 1928 date.

My grandfather’s life pre- and post-war was enlightened by several facts and tales in the file. It’s something that will give his biography just that much more life to it and I’m very happy about it.

My grandfather’s time in the German military got a lot more clear due to this file. The family story about his injury in the war is fleshed out by his own words and I now know where he served. Of course, the further proof of his time at the Eastern Front only makes me want to find the book my aunt told me about so much more. Apparently, my grandfather is named in that book. I’m still looking for it, as she’s forgotten both the title and the author.

My grandfather’s naturalization was always a bit of a mystery to us, as he became a naturalized citizen quite late, in 1957. This file held the answer to his late naturalization, but it also raised a new question. Apparently, he’d tried to get naturalization in 1937 but was rejected. I hadn’t check the records for naturalization yet, so when I do I’ll make sure to search for that rejected request to see if I can’t find a reason for it.

But the real gem, the one that made me certain that yes, there is a genea-Santa and yes, I had been a good girl, was the information about Adolph Knura’s parents. Until then, I only had their names, which is not a lot to go on. Now though, I have information about why and when his parents came to Bottrop, and their birthplaces in Poland! Well, I’ve got a great lead to their birthplaces, but no actual clue as to where it is yet. But that’s enough to write a whole separate post about, which I will do in the near future. Suffice to say it is a whole lot more than the nothing I had.

All in all, this file gave me a lot of information. It ended my search into several big questions and opened up whole new questions with the information I found. A search that started out with merely trying to determine the truth of a family story ended up giving me the pieces of the puzzle that might get me over the border and a generation further. So you see, no story is too small to check out. You might never know what unexpected gems you’ll find!

Are You Sure You Want To Know?

2011-01-17T19:19:00.001+01:00

Are you sure you want to know? That’s the question my mother asked me when I started researching her father’s war past. She was concerned I might learn of things I rather hadn’t known. Luckily for me, my grandfather hadn’t any skeletons in his closet from that time. The same question popped back into my mind yesterday when I was watching an episode of the Dutch version of Who Do You Think You Are?.

Dutch celebrity Jan Jaap van der Wal researched his great-grandfather’s war past, after having heard stories that he had to go into hiding at the end of 1942. During his research, the picture he was forming about his great-grandfather began to show something very different than what he’d always thought. Documents started showing a pro-German attitude and even a possible desire to join the SS. Luckily, this story had a ‘happy’ ending, when his great-grandfather stood up against the Germans, refusing to help them capture Jews, which ended with him having to go into hiding as an arrest warrant was put out for him as well.

What this showed is that family stories can be quite different from reality, especially when it’s about things like actions in a war. Once you start researching, you might learn things about your ancestors you rather hadn’t known. But once you begin to get the first inklings that something is wrong, it is already too late to stop.

So what’s a researcher to do? Keep on digging, even if there’s a possibility you might not like what you find? And what do you do with such information if you do find something you wish you didn’t know?

Family Legend, True or False? Part 3: Answers At Last?

2011-01-14T14:58:00.001+01:00

Last time, I talked about the fact that I had not found any evidence as of yet that my aunt’s memory of my grandfather’s arrest and the story in the book was true. I’d not been able to find mention of my grandfather in any of the archives of Kamp Vught. But then, at last, the answer to my inquiry to the NIOD came. They did not have any records of my grandfather at Kamp Vught either, but they told me to try the CABR archive kept at the National Archive.

The CABR is an archive that consists of files of people who came into contact with the Special Justice that was instated after World War Two to investigate anyone who was suspected of having sided with the Germans. If my grandfather had been arrested, or even just questioned, there would be a file about him. It’s a restricted archive, though, which means you need permission to view it. Luckily for me, my grandfather is deceased and I am a direct descendant, which is the best case scenario for getting access to my grandfather’s file. Provided, of course, that there was a file. I sent my enquiry and then the wait began.

The reply was thankfully quick and a positive one: there was a file on my grandfather and I had permission to view it! There was no guarantee to what was in there though. So I went to the National Archive. My mission was to prove or disprove these three facts:

- My grandfather served at the Eastern Front (book and family stories)
- My grandfather was arrested and imprisoned at Kamp Vught for several months (my aunt) or a year (book)
- My grandfather got to stay in the Netherland because of intervention by the Mayor of Voorschoten (my aunt)

Did I find my answers? Why, yes I did! And they were quite unexpected.

My grandfather served at the East Front

From his own statement, I was able to prove this fact. My grandfather didn’t only serve on the Eastern Front in the north, he served in several other countries as well.
Due to his statements, given at different times, I’ve been able to make a nearly complete reconstruction of the happenings since the Germans attacked the Netherlands (started preparing for War, even) until the capitulation of the Germans, which brought my grandfather back in the Netherlands with his family. I’ll write this up in a separate post at a later date, as it’s quite a story on its own.

My grandfather was arrested and imprisoned at Kamp Vught for several months or a year

This was the most important reason I went to the National Archive. I desperately wanted to know if this was true. One of the first papers I viewed after I opened the file was in fact an official message from Kamp Vught declaring the release of my grandfather! It was true and the proof was right in front of me. Reading the file, I found more documents proving this.
Although I have not been able to find my grandfather’s arrest date in the file, the earliest date I can place him at Kamp Vught is 22 August 1945. My aunt is right in this case, he was there for less than a year, as he is transferred to prison in Leiden on 1 December 1945. He’s released completely on 20 December 1945.

My grandfather got to stay in the Netherland because of intervention by the Mayor of Voorschoten

Before I get into what I found out about this in the file, first a little history on this. Before the war, law in the Netherlands was such that if a woman married a man, they assumed the man’s nationality. So when my grandfather’s sister Anna Knura married the Dutch Lambertus van Aken, she got the Dutch nationality. In reverse, when my grandfather married my Dutch grandmother she became a German national, as did their two children who were born before the war.

After the war, all German nationals were deported to Germany. My grandfather was first arrested, which delayed the deportation of him and his family, but they were supposed to be deported. However, in the file, the following note was found:

“Would initially be deported. Permission to stay only given because of exemplary behavior of the wife during the war.”

There was no sign of anything the Mayor might have written. There was a letter of recommendation from my grandfather’s brother-in-law Lambertus van Aken, who was a famous resistance fighter and also a big name in the clean-up after the war. In the end though, it was my grandmother’s actions in the war that kept the family in Voorschoten.

What were my grandmother’s actions, you might ask? Well, she helped Lambertus hide Jews and other wanted people during the war. There’d always been stories in the family about this, but I’ve never once heard my grandmother mention it, nor was there any proof. However, in Lambertus’ letter he comes right out and says she helped him by doing this, plus the note also indicates this happened. So by disproving this tidbit of the family legend I was researching, I proved another one!

Tuesday, in Part 4: Endings and Beginnings I will tell you about the very unexpected gems of information I found in this file – which of course brought me new questions I am still struggling with – as well as neatly wrapping up the research into this particular family legend.

Family Legend, True or False? Part 2: Lost: One Archive

2011-01-12T14:39:00.006+01:00

Last time I talked about uncovering a tale about my grandfather’s arrest and imprisonment in Kamp Vught after World War Two. I wanted to find some paper proof to collaborate this story and figured the most logical place to start would be the website of Kamp Vught, which is now a national monument.

I found some information there about Kamp Vught after the war. During the war it had served as an internment camp of the Nazi’s. After the allied forces took it in 1944 it was turned into a prison camp for thousands of Dutch nationals who were suspected of collaborating with the enemy and thousands of evacuated Germans from the border area between the Netherlands and Germany. So it was indeed possible that my grandfather had been imprisoned there because he was suspected of being a traitor.

I couldn’t really find anything about an archive though, although I did find mention they kept an archive about the period in which the camp was in Nazi hands. That wouldn’t help me though, so I had to look further. I figured there were two likely archives I could find material about the Kamp Vught after the war.

One possibility was the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (until 9 December 2010 the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation), which has a lot of archives and other material about the war period in the Netherlands and also some things about the aftermath. I checked their online catalogue, but couldn’t find an archive for Kamp Vught in that period. So although I wrote to them, I was doubtful I would find anything there.

Another possibility was the Brabants Historic Information Center, the BHIC. Vught is one of the towns who’s archive is kept by the BHIC. I figured if there was a part of the prison archive that survived, it would be there. I wrote to this archive as well.

I got a really fast answer from Mrs. van Geloven from the BHIC. She’d checked the personal files kept from Interneringskamp Vught, later called Strafgevangenis Nieuw-Vosseveld. Unfortunately, there was no mention of my grandfather in those files. She asked me for some extra information to better search for my grandfather in the archives they had. I told her my grandfather lived in Voorschoten at the time of his arrest, sometime in 1945. I also told her he’d just returned from the East Front, where he’d served in the German army as a medic.

Once again, she got back to me very fast. She’d checked the records of the police department Vught, where there were several archives that had to do with Kamp Vught in the period my grandfather would’ve been there. Unfortunately, he wasn’t to be found in the archive of prisoners that resided at Kamp Vught in the period 1945-1946, nor in the archive of foreigners, Germans and stateless ex-Dutch people residing at Kamp Vught in the period 1947-1952. He also wasn’t listed in the alphabetical list of prisoner names, period 1944-1946.

I was severely disappointed that nothing had been found. Mrs. van Geloven did mention that on his persoonskaart there should be a note about his internment in Kamp Vught or any other camp he would’ve been held in and perhaps that would give me some clues. Unfortunately, I had that document in my possession already and there was nothing on it about any imprisonment, in Kamp Vught or elsewhere.

Back of persoonskaart Adolph Knura, no mention of imprisonment to be found. Parts blacked out due to privacy reasons

I was beginning to doubt the story. In none of the archives I’d searched so far had I been able to find even one shred of evidence that the story of my grandfather’s arrest and imprisonment was true. Sure, my aunt remembered it, but she’d been four. Could I rely on her memory, or was it just a tale told to her at that age?

Friday, I’ll talk about the response of the NIOD, that prompted me to do one last search to find out the truth behind this family legend in Part 3: Answers At Last?

Family Legend, True or False? Part 1: Uncovering a Tale

2011-01-10T14:35:00.004+01:00

Back in March 2010 I spotted a local history book when walking into my local bookstore. It was about the Second World War and its aftermath, and specific to my town. I’d long coveted the book, knowing many of my ancestors would be mentioned there. Several of my ancestors were either active in the resistance or big names in the town during and after the war, so they were sure to be mentioned.

I looked through the names index in the back, seeing many names I was expecting: van Aken, Lamboo, Bolle, all familiar names and ancestors of mine. But one name greatly surprised me. My grandfather Adolph Knura was mentioned in the book! He was born in Bottrop, Germany and came to the Netherlands in 1932. His sister, Anna Knura, was married to L.J. van Aken and he came to live with her and work for L.J. van Aken’s painting company. He met my grandmother Henriette Geertruida Lamboo and got married. By the time the war broke out, they had two children. But however much my grandfather had integrated into Dutch society, he was still legally a German citizen. And so it came to pass that my grandfather was called to serve in the German army. He didn’t want to, but he still had parents and siblings in Germany and if he didn’t comply, they would feel the wrath of the Nazi’s. It was only after the war ended that he returned home, so I was not expecting him to be mentioned specifically in the book.

Adolph Knura, 1942-1944, German military

Of course I bought the book and when I got home I looked up the page my grandfather was mentioned. There really were only a few sentences about him, but what a shock they brought! Instead of saying something about him being called on to serve in the German army, it said that my grandfather, as a German national that lived in the Netherlands, was arrested after the war and imprisoned for a year. He was accused of being a traitor, but eventually released. The source was an interview with someone not known to me or my older family members. My mother didn’t even know anything about this, but she was born some fifteen years after the events would have happened. So I called my aunt, who was four years old during these alleged events.

My aunt remembered the events mentioned in the book quite clearly for a four year old. She recalled visiting her father in Kamp Vught, where he had been imprisoned for less than a year according to her. She also recalled that my grandfather and his whole family were to be transported out of the country, but that the major of Voorschoten wrote a letter to keep them in the country. She said that she believed that if Adolph had been a common soldier instead of a medic in the army, they would’ve had to move to Germany. She didn’t know much else.

I decided that the memories of my aunt and the mention in the book were enough to think the story was true, but I wanted proof. Paper proof that is. I figured it wouldn’t be hard to find evidence of my grandfathers imprisonment, once I figured out where the archive of Kamp Vught was kept, that is. But finding the archives wasn’t as easy as I thought…

The story will continue on Wednesday with Part 2: Lost: One Archive

My genealogy research/writing plan for 2011

2010-12-27T16:31:00.001+01:00

Taking a bit of a break from my blogging hiatus to write up my genealogy research/writing plan for 2011 for the next edition of the COG.

Genealogy research

My big project for 2011 will be researching Salomon Mulder. I’ve devided it into four sections: his childhood, his military career prior to 1942, his time as a POW, and his final years of his military career and his pension.

I also need to finish my research of Adolph Knura. I still need to find out some things about his migration, for which I will need to visit the Regional Archive of Leiden, and his naturalization. During that visit to the RAL, I also need to search for the last puzzle pieces of the Knura migration, with special attention to Anna and Maria Knura.

And finally, when the weather turns warm again, I want to visit Rosenburgh cemetery. A lot of my relatives are buried there.

Writing

Plenty to do on that end. In January, I want to finish the biography of Lodewijk Wesselo. I also want to edit the biography of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo, but that won’t be done until later in the year. At the end of the year, when my research into him is completed, I want to write up the biography of Adolph Knura.

As for my blog, in the first half of the year, I am going to do a series about exploring a family legend and the puzzles and surprises along the way. In the second half of the year, I will be doing a series about the Dutch Monarchs.

Plenty to do, so little time. I’m going back to my blogging break now. I’ll need the energy!

Little Blogging Hiatus

2010-12-17T20:52:00.002+01:00

As you've probably all noticed, I am currently taking a little blogging hiatus for the month December. This was unexpected, but besides the holiday season, this is just a really, really busy time for me right now. I will be writing a post for the COG next week, but other than that, blogging won't resume until after New Year's Day.

Military Monday: Prisoners of the Japanese

2010-11-22T21:58:00.002+01:00

One of three ancestors I am currently focussing on is Salomon Mulder (1900-1986). He was a career military man who was stationed in the Dutch East Indies when World War Two broke out in that area. From his military file, I know he was captured and imprisoned in a POW camp in Singapore.

But while there are plenty of resources available about civilian internment camps in the Dutch East Indies and surrounding areas, there is precious little information specific about POWs. What little I knew was gleaned from various books, most often the introduction, and cursory. The most information I could find was about the Thailand-Burma Railroad, also known as the Death Railway, but as far as I know or could determine, my great-grandfather never worked there.

But during my last trip to the library, I found a great book called Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific by Gavan Daws. It deals exclusively with POWs, has many pages in which Singapore is mentioned according to the index in the back, and although the stories in it are exclusively American POWs, the author explains in his introduction he did this because the American POWs, unlike the POWs from other nationalities, were in every single POW camp to exist.

I am very hapy with this find and I'm certain I'll learn a lot about this period of Salomon's life, even though there won't be any information specific to him in the book. I also saw there was an extensive list of archives used in the book, most of them abroad, so I might even come across an archive I never would've thought to look for Salomon in.

There's one in every family: Genealogy Researchers!

2010-11-21T20:44:00.001+01:00

There’s one in every family. One what, you might ask. Well, one ‘nutjob’ who takes on the daunting task of delving into family history. And of course, when you’re starting out with genealogy, you hope to be lucky enough that there was one such person in your (distantly related) family who already did some of the research.

I was lucky, very lucky. I didn’t have one, not two, not three, but four such people who’ve researched entire lines that I share. I’d like to take this 100th edition of the COG to put them in the spotlight, as a thank you for the work they’d already done. It really helped me this first year to find my footing in amongst the masses of paper, photographs and information.

The very first person who’s helped me on my path to genealogy is Jan Correljé, a cousin of my father, who’s researched many lines and has a great website, which has greatly helped my own research. Although he has information on the Wesselo and van Grasstek family line, I am particularly grateful for the information he has on the Bolle family, as this is information that is, as far as I know, all his own work.

The Bolle family is my paternal grandmother’s line and Jan’s research goes back to Adriaan Bolle, born around 1595 in Haamstede, the Netherlands. I have not looked at this line, aside from what Jan has on his website, but from what little I have taken a look at, it all checks out.

I mentioned that Jan’s site also has information on the van Grasstek family line. This is the family line of my great-great-grandmother on my paternal grandmother’s maternal line. Although Jan Correljé has the information on his website, this line was not primarily researched by him. In fact, it was researched through many generations. The first researchers were George Willem van Grasstek (1875-1942) and his cousin Lodewijk van Grasstek (1919-1996). After the war, Wilhelmus Hendricus van Grasstek (1921-1974) took over the research, adding yet more information together with his wife. The research was then taken over by his nephew Jan van Grasstek (1943-1994) and is now in the hands of his younger brother Lodewijk van Grasstek and his family. And then I am still leaving out many of the contributors to this genealogy.

Considering the amount of people who’ve worked on the van Grasstek family line, it shouldn’t be surprising they’ve managed to trace it back all the way to Lodewijck Thomasz. van Gresteck, born around 1585 in Monschau, Germany. I haven’t taken a look at this line yet, but the knowledge that all the information is there, just needing a check, is a comforting thought.

Then of course, there is the Wesselo family line, also on Jan Correljé’s website. This is my maternal grandmother’s maternal line. The bulk of the work on this name was done by Willem Lodewijk Wesselo (1893-1960). He’s the one that made the Wesselo family archive, now residing at the CBG in Den Haag.

This line I am actually working on, trying to fill in some blanks that the family archive doesn’t cover, writing biographies that show (hopefully) the life stories of the Wesselo’s a bit more than the meager facts and small bio’s that are available on the website. I am carefully checking the facts with original sources and transcribing with endless patience (if I do say so myself) the dozens of letters in the Wesselo family archive. In the end, I hope to flesh out these people and maybe even discover something new!

Aside from Jan Correljé’s site and the researchers behind the data he has there, I’ve had the pleasure of having contact with other researchers who’ve researched shared lines. The most notable of these is Jan Lamboo. He actually found me through this blog, shortly after I started it, and has researched my maternal grandmother’s line, the Lamboo family, extensively. He’s managed to trace this line back to Hermannus Lambo (also Lamboij), born around 1690 in most likely Kranenburg, Germany.

I haven’t been able to check back so far yet, but the little checking I’ve done all seems to indicate everything is correct. I did a lot of work on my grandmother Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo, but this line is not a priority for me at the moment, because all older members of this line have passed away already. Instead, I am currently focusing on the Mulder line, where my great-aunt is still alive to tell tales. I do plan on returning to this line in the (probably) near future and am very grateful to have this research as a starting point.

I also had contact recently with Nienke Kuurstra, who I found through an online family tree, who shared a common ancestor with me. I contacted her and she was kind enough to send me the information she had about Willemijntje van Veen, an ancestor in my Versloot line. She had information about Willemijntje and the three generations before her, tracing the van Veen line back all the way to Jacob Jansz. van Veen, born in 1687 in Nieuwkoop, the Netherlands. I’ve not had the time to check out the information, or even enter it into my database, but I am very grateful for her friendly and very speedy reply.

Last, but not least, there is the Versloot line. This is the line my great-grandmother on my paternal grandfather’s side and a line I am actively working on. I found two researchers with information on this through online family trees and contacted both of them. Peet van Dee emailed me back with the information he had, providing information on my great-grandmother’s parents and siblings.

Then there is H. Versloot, who also has a family tree online in which my great-grandmother appears. He’s managed to trace back the Versloot line all the way back to Gerrit Jans Versloot, born around 1638 in Reeuwijk, the Netherlands. I’ve contacted him, but haven’t heard back from him, unfortunately. I also haven’t seen the information I offered on Adriana Versloot, which was missing from the online family tree, appear. Still, I am thankful for his work and the fact that he saw fit to share it online, often with sources. It’s immensely helpful when doing my own research.

As this long list of people who’ve done genealogy research on the same ancestors that I can call mine shows, we are never alone in our work. Our direct environment might call us insane for loving genealogy, but there are people out there working on the exact same people! I’m very lucky to have found so many wonderful researchers, who’ve elected to share their finds with the world and with me. I can only do the same, here on my blog, and hope that I might provide future researchers of the lines I am working on with the same help as they have provided me, simply by sharing.

To all those named in this post, I give a heartfelt thank you. Thank you for the years and years of work you’ve all put into your research. Thank you for your generosity in sharing. And might I just say, I’m glad that there really is ‘one in every family’!

One Year Blogiversary

2010-11-20T21:28:00.000+01:00

I can’t believe it’s been a year already! And what a year it was. From having done nothing at all in the area of genealogy to researching closed archives with special permission, I’ve done a lot this past year. I’ve had my ups and downs in posting as well, both in number of posts per month as in content. Sometimes it was just a silly, little post, no more than a reminder that I was still alive and kicking, this last month a good testimony of that. But sometimes I produced posts I’m still very, very proud of.

And although an anniversary is always a good time to look back, I think it’s an even better time to look forward. So, I’ll lift a tip of the veil and show you some of what I am planning for my second year blogging!

You’ll hear more about the primary people I am now researching, namely Lodewijk Wesselo (writing his biography now), Adolph Knura (his Dutch period) and Salomon Mulder (in particular his time as a POW). There are also two series in the planning, one which will chronicle my journey to uncover the truth behind a family legend and another series about the Dutch monarchs.

So, plenty to look forward to this next blogging year. Onwards, I say!

We Are the Bards of Our Age

2010-11-03T22:14:00.002+01:00

Bard: those who sang the songs recalling the tribal warriors' deeds of bravery as well as the genealogies and family histories of the ruling strata among Celtic societies.

In the old days, it were the bards that preserved history. Both the history of an entire people as the more personal history of some families. Since that time, a lot has changed. Nevertheless, people still have history, we all still have ancestors and a lot of people are interested in those histories and ancestors.

But in these times of Google and Facebook, information is more often than not fleeting. People rarely take the time to sit down and talk about the past. The retelling of family tales is getting more and more rare and with that, more and more of our own personal history is lost.

However, there are those brave few (although we are growing in numbers!) that wade into the swamp that is family tales, stacks of unidentified photographs and towering piles of paper to delve into the past. We are genealogists. We construct our history, the lives of our ancestors and with every piece of information we find and add to our databases, we are preserving this history.

Yet this history, saved though it is for the moment, is still in danger of being lost. Try as we might, we cannot stop time, nor are we immortal. There will come a day that we will no longer walk this Earth. If we are not careful, our painstakingly reconstructed family history will be buried alongside us, the stories once again lost in time.

Therefore it is up to us to not only put our research in a genealogical database, but also to write the story of our ancestors down. Because it will be these stories that will be remembered by our non-genealogically inclined family members. And it will be through these stories that our history and ancestors will live on.

So I call on all of you, my fellow genealogists, to join me in becoming the bards of our age!

Definition of a bard taken from Wikipedia.

Spreading the Christian Faith

2010-10-22T20:13:00.002+02:00

Although the mission is not technically a religious rite or ceremony, it was an important part of the church around 1900 and played an important part in the lives of some of my ancestors. Gerardus ten Broek, who was married with my great-grandmother’s sister Jannetje Wesselo, was a protestant missionary-teacher in Great-Sangir in the Dutch East Indies. The newly wedded couple went to the Dutch East-Indies in 1911 to spread the Christian faith. Unfortunately, Gerardus died from the Spanish Flu in 1918 at 33 years of age. Jannetje continued her husband’s work alone for some time until a new couple took over.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the lives of this couple, but when the topic of this COG came up I thought it was time to take a closer look at the history of Dutch missionaries in the Dutch East Indies. There are basically three periods when looking at this.

1798-1900

The VOC, the Dutch East Indies Company, had never really cared about spreading the Christian faith, only about profit. When they bankrupted in 1798, the Dutch East Indies and surrounding territories had few Christians. In fact, it was mostly Islamic. But when around 1800 freedom of faith became a right in the Dutch East Indies, the mission got a large impulse. Special societies for the promotion of the mission were started, but the government in Batavia was afraid of unrest and refused to give the missionaries access to overwhelmingly Islamic areas. This changed in 1850 when the government reluctantly allowed missionaries on Java.

The missionaries in this time period came overwhelmingly from the middle class. After a brief education, which usually didn’t prepare them in the least for the differences in culture, they were sent off with the instruction to report often by letter. Parts of these letters ended up in newsletters for their philanthropists, because the mission had to fund itself completely.

After a century of spreading the Christian faith the success was marginal. Small parts of the Dutch East Indies had been christened, but large parts were still overwhelmingly Islamic.

1900-1942

In 1901 the political climate in the Netherlands toward the Dutch East Indies changed. The new policy was to give something back to the colony in return for everything the Netherlands had taken from them with the occupation. The government gave great sums of money to set up hospitals and schools. It were often the missionaries who set up these hospitals and schools. This was very favorable for the mission, because it brought them into contact with the children and once they were converted to the Christian faith, the older people usually followed. At the same time, the Netherlands got a firmer grip on the more wild areas, like Netherlands New Guinea, making them safer and thus accessible to missionaries.

In this time period organization of the mission improved as well. In the Dutch East Indies the cooperation with the government improved greatly after a special mission consulate was opened. At the same time, the many organizations in the Netherlands started working together and a joint school for missionaries was opened in Oegstgeest. Research into languages, countries, and people had been done and the results were used to educated prospective missionaries. This caused the new missionaries to be far better informed about where they were going to be working.

From 1890 onwards, more and more unmarried women went to the Dutch East Indies as nurses, teachers or social workers. The male missionaries had to spend more and more time on administration, becoming managers instead of missionaries. The direct contact with the parish was done more and more by locals.

1942-1960

World War Two made an end to the mission. In 1940 the German missionaries that where in the Dutch East Indies were interned in camps by the Dutch. The Dutch missionaries followed them when the Japanese started their occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942. Proportionally a lot of missionaries died during the war because of the bad conditions and executions. After the war, the mission never really got started again. In fact, it slowly came to a complete stop. It was the end for European missionaries in this area of the world.

Archives

Throughout the many years of mission work, a lot of archives were made. A very big list of (almost) all archives that have anything to do the mission for the time period 1800-1960 can be found here. For my own research, this archive is very important, as it is the combined archive for all the missionary work done in the Dutch East Indies for the denomination Gerardus ten Broek was a missionary for. Also interesting is the Dutch book Zending en volksleven in Nederlands-Indië by H.T. Fischer, for those who read Dutch.

Conclusion

The little I know about Gerardus ten Broek fits completely into the image I’ve gotten from the mission in 1900-1942. He spoke Malaysian, a testimony to the improved education prospective missionaries got in the Netherlands. He opened a Dutch-Malaysian school, following the newly installed politics of the early 20th century. Whatever else I may discover about him and his wife, I am sure that the background I now have about the mission in the Dutch East Indies will help me place it in the right context.

Sources:

http://www.kerkinactie.nl/Kerk-en-gemeenten/ZWO/Geschiedenis--i13765
http://www.jenneken.nl/bekijk/1900MISSIEENZENDING.htm
http://www.tongtong.nl/indische-school/contentdownloads/kappelhof_09web.pdf
http://genealogie.correlje.com/paginas/indexwesselo.html

A Reasonable Exhaustive Search – How Far Is Far Enough?

2010-10-12T07:52:00.000+02:00

The Genealogical Proof Standard is used to raise genealogical research to an academic level and to make sure that whatever conclusions you draw are as near to the truth as they can get. The first step in the Genealogical Proof Standard is to conduct a reasonably exhaustive search for all information pertaining to your question.

Now, when doing research and looking for answers to certain questions, I can most certainly see the use in this. However, I am currently faced with a bit of a conundrum. I am currently in the process of writing a biography of Lodewijk Wesselo. His life was very well documented and all of this documentation was collected by another, now deceased, genealogist and donated to the CBG, where I checked it out. There were a few pieces missing, like official birth, marriage and death certificate, which I looked up, and some photographs, which I also located as far as I was able.

Yet, I know that there are some sources still untapped. I know I can request a persoonskaart, yet I also know it will tell me nothing new. In fact, this data would’ve been transferred from the official birth, marriage and death certificates, which I’ve got. There’s an archive a couple of hours from here that might have some more information about the company Lodewijk was a manager of for eight years, and the archive in Den Haag might have some information on a company he worked for briefly. These things are stones unturned.

However, if I look at the mountain of data already available to me, I know I’ve got more than enough to accurately tell his life story. I have his own words about the companies he worked for, both from letters and from his brief autobiography. There is no real need for this information, especially considering the costs and time it would take to get the information, if there is information at all. Not to mention the fact that he has 11 other brothers and sisters, who have an equal amount of information in the archive I have yet to look at. And it took me five whole days for Lodewijk!

On the other hand, I know that if Lodewijk was my direct ancestor (he wasn’t, his sister Alida Petronella was) I would go and look this information up. So maybe I’m being a bit hypocritical here. But still, I wonder, when is it exhaustive enough? Should I look up this information, if it is there, or can I let it go, knowing I have his whole life laid out in front of me already, sources and all?

Amenuensis Monday - Lodewijk Wesselo's World War Two Letters

2010-10-11T11:03:00.002+02:00

I've been steadily working on Lodewijk Wesselo's letters. Currently I'm working on the letters he wrote during World War 2. In the beginning of the war he's still writing letters to his brother and sister-in-law in the Dutch East Indies, but later on the letters are to his brother in Voorschoten, Zuid-Holland, the Netherlands.

Sometimes, when I am transcribing these letters, I stumble across something which I just don't understand. Most of the times, it's just one sentence that makes me go: "huh?" This time, it was this specific sentence:"

"Nothing more to do in the business, we open at 9 and close at one, on Monday's the whole day, with permission from the police because of illness."

The business he's talking about is a store that sold jewelry and objects made of precious metals like gold and silver. The date of the letter is 10 October 1944.

Now, I understood why they didn't have much to do, but what I couldn't understand was why he would need permission from the police to close early, or even the whole day. So I turned to the people at a forum about World War Two, thinking it probably had something to do with the war. The answer I got surprised me, to say the least.

Appearently, the law in those days about the opening hours of shops was much more strict. The police were the ones enforcing those laws. In those days, certain types of shops were closed on certain days. Stores that sold food items were often closed on Wednesday afternoons, whereas clothing and jewelry shops were often closed on Mondays. If you as an owner were in the store after closing hours, you had a high chance of a police officer coming by to check on you, making sure you weren't trading outside of authorized hours. So, you had to notify the police of any changes in openingstime.

I never knew this, and according to the people on the forum, this meddling happened as late as the 60s! It wasn't, as I thought, connected to World War Two at all. Instead, it was just as society was at the time, and I merely lacked the proper knowledge about how things worked back then. So it goes to show, that every historical document, especially things like letters, should be seen in light of the time they were written to make sense!

Sentimental Sunday: School Memories age 6-8

2010-10-10T09:37:00.003+02:00

In the Netherlands children enter the schoolsystem at age 4. They start when they turn 4 in classes where you mostly play, with some playful education thrown in, until the children are about 6 years old, when they enter the class where you start to learn how to read and write. You stayed at this school, called primary school, until age 12. Then you’d go to high school until graduation at age 16, 17, or 18, depending on what level of education you were getting.

Class 3

This was the class where we started on learning to read, write and basic math. I know we had a female teacher, Miss H. who I didn’t like very much. I remember being friend with E. still and I was also friends with a boy named H. This was also the class where the real bullying started, which didn’t let up until I left school.

H. had a lot of problems with Miss H. He also had something along the lines of asthma, I think, although later on he didn’t have any problems with that any more, as far as I know. I remember one morning it was very, very foggy outside. The fog was thick and if you stretched out your hand, you had to concentrate to see it clearly. H. was late for school that day, because he’d had an asthma attack because of the fog. I remember Miss H. being angry about that, even though H.’s mother explained why he was late. H. cried because of the whole thing. Eventually, the situation between H. and Miss H. became untenable, and H. transferred to another school.

I also remember M. She was the daughter of one of the teachers at school and afraid (or more accurately made afraid by her overprotective mother (the teacher)) of every little thing that could potentially be scary. Witches, monsters, everything out of fairytales except for the princess, basically. One time, during craft hour, we were making these witches out of paper. She was excused from class and went and sat in the hall with a book, because making a witch out of paper would be too scary for her. Another example of this: we watched the educational series Ik Mik Loreland, where the main character Mik is searching for the letters of the alphabet which were stolen. In this series there was a monster. Sure, it was a bit creepy, but it wasn’t that bad. Yet every time a scene with the monster was coming, Miss H. had to stop the tape, excuse M. from class, then re-start the tape. After the monster was gone again, the tape was stopped again and M. could come in.

This was also the class I first kissed a boy in. I was kind of friends with C. and one day we were both sitting on Miss H.’s desk (don’t ask me how or why), Miss H. wasn’t there and we got dared to kiss, which we did. Just a small peck on the lips, but still, that was my first kiss.

Class 4

I had a female teacher for this class, but can’t for the life of my remember her name. If I remember correctly, this was the school year in which my best friend E. moved. I didn’t make a new friend until class 6, so it could also be that E. moved in class 5. It was also the year I started answering the bullying by getting so angry I started hitting the bullies. Not the best way to deal with things, but the only way I knew.

Class 5

Yet again a female teacher, the name I can’t remember. This was the year we were working on my anger problems. I had a notebook and every day at the end of the day, the teacher would write down how that day had gone, and if there hadn’t been any problems, I’d get a sticker. Five stickers in a row would get me a little treat from my parents, five times five stickers in a row (so 25 in a row) would get me a book. Now, I’ve always loved reading, so that was a pretty good incentive. The method worked, albeit with some bumps in the road. The bullying didn’t stop and they seriously provoked me, which my mother later told me that if she’d known about that, she would’ve insisted on more measures being taken against the bullies.

I don’t have a lot of memories of class 3 to 5, not only because I was still fairly young, but also because they weren’t very pleasant years. I’ve blocked out a lot of things and the professionals I later talked with said it’s best left alone. Still, I remember some things, like my friendship with E., and I remember those few things with fondness.

Ik Mik Loreland Intro

Tombstone Thursday – Hunting for Wesselo graves

2010-10-05T14:42:00.000+02:00

Imagine this: a busy shopping street in the middle of town on a Saturday morning. As you walk it’s length, you pass two supermarkets, several clothing stores, a candy story, a sportswear store, a lunch room, and a furniture shop. In the end, you stop in front of a department store that’s housed in a building where there used to be a school.

You might ask yourself, what’s that got to do with hunting for graves? It’s simple really, because when you turn around, at the other side of the road, is a church with a cemetery. The weird part is that the moment you walk through the cemetery gate, the sounds from the busy street get hushed. It’s a bit of a creepy feeling, to be honest.

It’s this cemetery where my Wesselo ancestors are buried. It was closed for burials around 1960, as the cemetery was full. Only graves that had already been bought were allowed to be used. A lot of graves are old and there are a lot of family graves. Some of the graves don’t have headstones anymore and there are plenty of graves that have ‘disappeared’, simply because other people were buried there too. In a country where land is scarce, it’s normal practice to ‘shake’ the graves after a certain amount of time, unless of course you pay for it not to happen. The grave can then be re-used. Because the burials stopped around 1960, the shaking of the graves did as well.

It was with this information I went there in hopes of locating at least some of the graves of my ancestors. On one hand, I was unlikely to find older graves because of the ‘shaking’ and the fact that the cemetery is very small causes the ‘shaking’ to happen more often. On the other hand, the burial stop around 1960 meant that some graves might have survived.

In the end, the only gravestone I could find was that of Abraham Bernardus Wesselo, my great-great uncle, and his wife Hendrika Johanna Wilhelmina Broer. If there were others there, they are now in unmarked graves.

Abraham Bernardus Wesselo 21-1-1884 19-9-1961
Hendrika Johanna Wilhelmina Broer 30-6-1889 16-4-1965

Sentimental Sunday: School Memories Age 4-6

2010-10-03T20:06:00.002+02:00

School Memories Age 4-6

In the Netherlands children enter the schoolsystem at age 4. They start when they turn 4 in classes where you mostly play, with some playful education thrown in, until the children are about 6 years old, when they enter the class where you start to learn how to read and write. At my school, Het Kompas, there were three of these ‘not-quite-school’ classes, class 1, class 1.5 (I’m still not sure why we had this class and not every child went here) and class 2. The teacher of class 1 was Miss N., I have no idea who the teacher of class 1.5 was, except that it was a woman, and the teacher of class 2 was Miss M. You stayed at this school, called primary school, until age 12. Then you’d go to high school until graduation at age 16, 17, or 18, depending on what level of education you were getting.

Class 1

My first memory of class one is from my very first day there. It was a kind of introduction day and I only spent a few hours there, if that. My mother was also there that day. I had grabbed a jigsaw puzzle and turned it over, not realizing it was a special puzzle. Instead of the normal, one layer, it had three layers. The bottom one was a caterpillar in several pieces, then on top of that there was a cocoon and at the very top it was a butterfly. It was much too difficult for me and I got really frustrated. I think in the end either my mother or Miss N. helped me? I don’t really recall.

What is perhaps most vivid in my mind from this period is my friend E. We met at school and were best friends. As long as I’ve known her, she suffered from cancer. When she started school, she’d already been fighting it for over a year, if not two, and had lost all of her hair due to chemotherapy. She always wore headscarves or hats. One of the things I remember most vividly about her is the fact that she always brushed her teeth after lunch. All of the other kids I knew, including myself, only brushed in the morning and at night. I do know her Mom was really strict about it. Now, looking back on it, it probably had something to do with her weakened immune system, but at the time, it was just a weird quirk, nothing more.

Another very vivid memory of this year is connected to E. There was a boy in our class, I have no clue what his name was, who was teasing E. He pulled her hat off, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. In those years I had a pretty explosive temper and now I was very, very angry. I grabbed him by the throat and pushed him up against the wall. Basically, I was choking him. Our teacher, Miss N., told me to put him down but she had to say it several times before I did, that’s how angry I was. I’m sure I was punished for it, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that Miss N. was very shocked, but honestly, it wasn’t that hard to shock her. I also remember that boy never teased E. again.

The last memory I have from this class is a P.E. lesson. I know it’s from this class because my friend S. was there and this was the only class we were in together, seeing as that he skipped class 1.5 and I didn’t. We were indoors and had to walk/run a track with obstacles. I jumped of a higher level, as required. Unfortunately, I ended up literally jumping on top of S., who was running below. I hit the top of his head with my chin, resulting in a teeth through my bottom lip for me. I never liked P.E., perhaps this was where the hate started?

Class 1.5

I have no memories of this class whatsoever. Isn’t that weird? It must not have been very memorable. I can’t even remember the teacher’s name. I do know that S. skipped this class, marking the ending of our time of being in the same class. We kept and still keep in touch, but we never again shared a class.

Class 2

Class 2 was led by one of my favorite teachers from my primary school, Miss M. She was always cheerful, always willing to listen, and later on, one of the very few teachers who I felt was on my side. One of the vivid memories I have of her is that she would always sit on the bench near the sandbox on a cushion during recess, on the schoolyard for the classes 1, 1.5, and 2.

In this year, there was a great party at our school. I think it was because the school existed for a certain number of years. There were a lot of different activities. E. and I sang (playbacked?) a song from the band Kinderen Voor Kinderen, called Groen (Green). It was a lot of fun! But at the end, someone forgot to stop the tape and the next song, Lege Plekken In De Klas (Empty Spots In The Class) started. So we sang that too!

Song: Green

What Happened To September?

2010-10-01T19:57:00.003+02:00

What happened to my Sentimental September posts? Well, they're all on paper, but a spotty internet connection and a very busy time kept me from typing them out and posting them. In fact, I had to scramble to get my COG post up in time!

All in all, though, Sentimental September was succesfull, as the memories are on paper! They'll be showing up in the coming Sentimental Sundays.

On to October, which has two goals:

1. Send out several inquiry letters (yes, sometimes it has to be done in a letter, even now) for my research on Adolph Knura

2. Finish the biogrpahy of Lodewijk Wesselo

Both seem like easy tasks, but they'll eat up more time than you expect.

Breaking Down the Wall

2010-09-29T22:57:00.005+02:00

About a year ago, I started my search for Salomon Mulder, my great-grandfather. I did not have a lot of information. In fact, all I had was his birth year and place, the known fact that he was in the military, the fact that he’d been a prisoner of war in the Dutch East Indies during World War Two, and an approximate date of death. I did know the name, birth and death dates of his first wife, Adriana Versloot, but nothing about their marriage.

His death certificate is not public yet, and because Mulder is such a common surname, I didn’t dare ask for a persoonskaart, since I could end up with a huge pile or nothing at all and I have to pay for each copy and the enquiry itself. I searched for his birth record, but I couldn’t find it, even though it had to be there. This was resolved much later in the search, but back then, it was still missing.

I had no idea where he was married, both times, so the only option for research I had left was the fact that he was military, so I wrote to the Nederlands Instituur voor Militaire Historie (NIHM, Dutch Institute of Military History) in hopes of finding out if there maybe was a record because he’d been a POW during WW2. I’d hoped to find his exact birth date on that, his marriage date, maybe the name of his parents, anything, something, to give me a clue as to where to look for him.

I got so much more than that! I got his entire military record! It’s chockfull of information; just mindboggling. I’ll spare you all the details, many of which I am still working out myself. I’ve learned to both love and hate the military through this record. I love the military because they wrote down everything, really everything! You’ve got to love bureaucracy. On the other end, being the efficient types they are, they use a lot (!) of abbreviations, many of which are still a mystery for me. Not to mention cramming as much information on a piece of paper as possible in some of the earlier records, so the handwriting is difficult to decipher. But, there are some real gems in there that blew my brick wall up, with tons and tons of the genealogical equivalent of C4 bombs!

I'll take you through the most important facts, as writing it all down would take at least ten posts. Clicking on the pictures will enlarge them.

Bomb #1: His full name and birth date, along with his military number.

Of course, this had to be on his records, but still, it was nice that on all his records the date was consistent. Salomon Mulder, born 28 November 1900 in Leiden. It was his birth date that enabled me to find his birth record.
I was also very happy with his military number, or should I say, military numbers! Apparently, he had two, and one replaced the other. This is very important information when I am looking for him in other military records!

Bomb #2: Both his marriages, along with his children and stepchildren

Both of his marriages were listen. His spouses full names are there, as well as the marriage dates. His three biological children from his first marriage, including my grandfather, are named as are their birth dates. What surprised me was that his three stepchildren, from his second wife, are also named with their birth dates. I knew they were there, I even have a picture of them, now I have names to go with the faces.

Bomb #3: His faith

You wouldn’t think this was such a big shocker. He was Roman-Catholic, so what? Well, my grandfather is not a Roman-Catholic. In fact, nobody in the family even knew he’d been a Roman-Catholic until his teens! Well, my grandmother knew, and she told me about it after I asked her, but I never would’ve asked if I hadn’t found this document.
The implications for further research into my Mulder line is staggering. Changing faith was not done much in the Netherlands and society was very much separated by faith. I would’ve been looking in all the wrong places for my ancestors if I hadn’t found this document!

Bomb #4: Parents

His parents were named, which helped in identifying the correct birth certificate later on. Not to mention, more sources is always good. His parents are Wilhelmus Johannes Bonifacius Mulder and Johanna van Wezel.

Bomb #5: Description

Yes, a description. It’s supposed to be in the records, but is not always present, so I was happy there was one. My great-grandfather was 1.78 meters tall, had blue eyes and blond hair. He had a scar on his left ring finger. This was recorded in 1946.

Bomb #6: Deployments

All of his deployments can be found in this record, from his enlistment on 7 May 1919 until his pension on 1 Februari 1949. What was very interesting to me was the very complete record of his journeys to and from the Dutch East Indies, where he served several times.

Bomb #7: His POW record

There’s a special section that details how Salomon fared during his last deployment to the Dutch East Indies. He was stationed in Soerabaja from 26 April 1940 onwards, until he was transferred on 1 March 1942. Four days later on 5 March 1942 he was captured by the Japanese and put in a prison camp. He was transferred at least once, seeing that he was liberated on 14 August 1945 in Singapore. He was brought to flight base Priok in Batavia on 8 October 1945 and to the repatriation camp Doorn, the Netherlands on 14 Januari 1946. From there he was transferred to the base in Voorschoten.

Bomb #8: Medals

Yes, it says medals, plural. He got to wear the ‘Oorlogsherinneringskruis’, for his service during World War Two, with three pins, all of them having to do with specific battles during that war. He also got the ‘Kleine Gouden Medaille’ for long, honorable and faithful service. The ‘ereteken “orde en vrede”’ and the ‘erdemedaille verbonden aan de Orde van Oranje Nassau in zilver met de zwaarden’ were also awarded to him. Four medals for military service, it’s quite an honor.

Bomb #9: Two personnel reviews

Two personnel reviews jump out at me because of the extra remarks they carry. The first review is dated 1 October 1946, and the review was ‘very good.’ As remark it is said: firm and correct in bearing, gives the impression of being somewhat nervous.’ I’m sorry, but after spending years in hell and not even being back in the Netherlands for a full year, I think he’s entitled to be a bit nervous!

The second review is from 1 July 1947, and this time it’s ‘excellent.’ The remark this time is: ‘Because of the diligence and the decisive actions several thefts were cleared up.’ Intriguing!

In the end, even though this document is ‘only’ 20 pages and I’ve had it in my possession for several months, there is still much to glean from this document. So much information is great, and what was once a brick wall is now a wide open road into the past.

Sentimental September: Memories 0-4 years old

2010-09-22T17:58:00.003+02:00

Let me first say, I don’t remember most of these things. They are stories told to me by my mother. Still, it happened, even if I don’t remember it, so I might as well write it down and start at the beginning.

Birth

When my mother was pregnant with me, she always said I would come when it started to freeze. Since her due date was at the end of November, beginning of December, it was a very real possibility. Due to the circumstances she was admitted into the hospital in Delft earlier than usual.

When my father went there on the evening of 1 December 1987, he had to scrape his windows because of the frost. It was after visiting hours and my mother was in labor. She threw my Dad out of the room and he ended up watching some kind of honeymoon show. She also threw out a male nurse. Afterwards, she said he was just trying to be nice, asking her if she needed anything. Her answer: “yes, you out of here!”

At 23.40 I was born, healthy as can be. My Dad tried to contact his parents and my mother’s parents to no avail. Also a lot of other people he wanted to call were unreachable. Ah, such is life…

Shots

When I was still very small, probably no more than nine months old, I had to have an immunization shot. Not nice! I cried afterwards and my mother soothed me. It was fine until my father came home from work. The moment he stepped inside I started to cry and I wouldn’t stop until he held me. And every time he tried to put me down, or even pass me to my mother, I started to cry again. He held me for hours. Poor man, to this day, he complains about the pain in his arm and shoulder…

Forgotten Tea

My grandfather on my mother’s side was very active with the local Voorschotense soccer club. At home games, he provided the tea that the players got in the half-time break.

One day, we were visiting and my parents and I, not yet two years old, had gone with my grandfather to the soccer club. When half-time came, the two teams left the ball on the field. I was delighted by the opportunity to play with it and set out across the field. My grandfather went after me. In all the commotion, something which had never happened before: my grandfather forgot to make tea!

Chickens

Sometime in the same period as the previous memory, we were on another visit to my maternal grandfather. He kept chickens and peacocks (among other animals) in his garden. It was spring and the chickens had chicks.

I was fascinated by them and while I was alone in the garden, I unlatched the door of the chicken coop. But the chicks were fine where they were and stayed put. Undaunted, I grabbed a hand of feed and threw it down. Of course the chickens came out now and spread out through the garden to chase the hands of feed I kept throwing around. I was delighted and my grandfather laughed himself silly (in comparison to the time another one of his grandchildren freed his prize peacocks and one of them escaped never to be seen again).

Smelly Business

Before I was potty-trained, my parents and I were visiting my paternal grandparents. My parents had put me down for a nap in one of the upstairs guestrooms.

When it remained quiet for a suspiciously long time, my mother came upstairs to check in on me. While everyone had been downstairs, I had somehow managed to unfasten my full diaper and was busy plastering the walls with my poo. My grandparents, especially my grandmother, were not amused.

Stinging Nettles

One memory I do have of my own, instead of being just a story my mother told me, happened not long after we moved from Delft to Voorschoten 1990. The garden was a bit wild and there were a lot of stinging nettles. In my mind they are very tall, but seeing as I was very little, that’s probably a matter of perception. I am sure though that they were taller than I was.

I was playing with at least two other children, perhaps my cousins, I am not sure. The ball we were playing with ended up in the stinging nettle forest and I was ‘elected’ to go and get it, as I was the youngest. I did go after it and brought it back, but the nettles hurt a lot and I cried. That’s all I remember.

Disappearance Act

I must’ve been around three years old, I guess, when my mother went shopping with her friend M.T. They took me with them. My mother and I were inside the shop and M.T. was browsing through a rack with clothes at the entrance of the store.

To this day, it remains a mystery how I could’ve left the shop unseen, but getting outside I did. In fact, I wandered down the street and across a bridge, to come across a shoe shop, where I stopped to look at the shoes on display in the window. While I was standing there, a nice lady asked me where my mother was, to which I pointed in the general direction and said: “there.” When she asked me what I was doing all alone, I answered something along the lines of “shopping.” It was then that my mother found me. She must’ve had such a fright!

Sentimental September

2010-09-21T21:41:00.002+02:00

How often have we wanted to find letters, a diary, or even a proper autobiography written by our ancestors? For however many documents we find, few tells us so much about our ancestor's daily lives, thoughts and dreams as those written by our ancestors themselves. Yet as we research our ancestors and wish for documents like that to turn up, how often do we ourselve leave such documents behind?

It was for this reason that at the beginning of this year I made the resolution to write down my own memories, so they will be recorded for my descendants. So future generations will never have the regret of not asking me for them when I was still alive.

However, I did not post or even write down nearly as many memories as I would have liked. So, in a bid to catch u, I am calling the remainder of this month Sentimental September. Every day I will post at least one memory, but more often then not I will post a memory group, either a group of memories about the same period of time or about the same subject.

I am not going to care about the order of these memories, or even about repeating them. The important thing is to get them down. It doesn't have to be neat and precise. I can order them later, clean them up when I've gotten most of it down on paper. Or if I'll never get to that, my descendants can have that job. I'm sure they'll be thankfull I wrote it down and won't care about order or neatness.

Amenuensis Monday – Lodewijk’s Children

2010-09-20T08:40:00.000+02:00

Most documents you’ll find of your ancestors are ones that weren’t meant to give genealogical information. But sometimes, you get a little gold gem that was written with the express intent to convey genealogical information.

In 1944, Abraham Wesselo wrote a letter to his brother Lodewijk on behalf of his brother-in-law to ask for genealogical information. I don’t have that letter (and so I have no idea which brother-in-law was working on the genealogy), but I do have the reply that Lodewijk’s daughter wrote. Appearently, her father wasn’t much impressed with genealogy, so she answered, although it did contain the information she got from her father.

In this letter, there are basic facts like her mother’s birth dateand her parent’s marriage date. Also, the birth dates of the children. But there is also some information that you can’t find anywhere else. I’ve translated the relevant bit:

There were three children born:
Hendrik 21 April 1900 died 28 April
The second son is not in the marriage book because he died after one day and according to Father a child is considered stillborn then
Antje 1 November 1902

[….]

We used to have a psalm book in which Mother had written down the birth date of the second Hendrik and of the first one off course, but it burned. However I seem to recall that that child was born in April as well. All three of us where born way too early!!!

Antje was wrong about the date of the second son, he was born on 8 October 1901 and died that same day according to the official records. However, because he was stillborn, he is not given a name in the records. Yet he did have one. Also, we now know that all three children were born too early, which probably was also the cause of the death of the first two. The psalm book she talked about probably burned when their house was destroyed by the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940.

Sweden - Here I Come!

2010-09-12T20:39:00.001+02:00

I will be going to Sweden tomorrow (at an insanely early hour!) and I will not be back until Monday 20th September. There will be no posts from me in that interval.

See you all when I get back!

Remembering 9/11

2010-09-11T16:30:00.000+02:00

8.46 am New York time. 14.46 local time. A plane collides with the World Trade center and news stations all over the world tap into the American news stations to show life footage.

I don’t exactly know why I put on the tv. It might have been because I was just zapping. It might have been because my mother called me, or perhaps I called her. It’s a bit of a blur, to be honest. I do know that when I watched, the first plane had already collided with the first tower.

Then, suddenly, I hear the commentator screaming: “Oh my God, another one just hit!”

It’s 9.02 am New York time, 15.02 local time. The second plane hits the second tower and the horrifying truth becomes clear. This is no accident.

The rest of the afternoon and evening, the tv was on. Every bit of news that trickled in just made the situation seem worse. Every image will forever be burned into my mind. It was the day the world changed.

Americans were hit the hardest, of course. Many of them lost someone, knew someone who was lost, lived in fear for some time. But the rest of the world was changed as well. No longer were we safe, no longer was there total peace in the Western World. A cowardice attack had changed all of it. There is no protection against these kinds of attacks, no amount of security measures you can take that will prevent this. No matter how hard you try.

The world is a lot more unsafe. The world will never be the same. I was there, I remember. I remember that day, I remember how it was before that day. The feeling of total safety that was before is something I will never be able to explain to my children, because they will be born in a world where terrorism is a reality. They will learn of this day in their history lessons, but I was there. I remember.

I will always remember.

Housekeeping and Planning

2010-09-03T19:52:00.002+02:00

I did some housekeeping today, adding surname pages and family sheets so people visiting my blog can more easily access my research and see what I am doing. I did this because I realized that I needed to adjust my plans. I can now clearly see I have bitten off far more than I can chew for this year, so I narrowed down my plans for the last months of the year.

I have four main goals I hope to accomplish in the remainder of 2010.

1. Finish my research on the Dutch Knura's, namely my grandfather and his sister, as well as the Dutch years of my grandfather's other sister and his brothers.

I have updated my research plan for my grandfather, there are three main things I still need to find sources for. His captivity in Camp Vught and subsequent release, his migration into the Netherlands, and his naturalization in the '50s. I have the archives where I can look for these sources, just need to find the time to search for them. Some of the archives I need permission for to look into, and that needs to be done in writing.

For my grandfather's sister, I need to find her migration into the country and I want to look up the documents she entered in order to get married. Unfortunately, these most likely reside in our local, very unhelpfull, archive. If that's the case, I might never get to see them.

As for the rest of the Knura's, I need to find their migration into and out of the country. I hope that I can find this, but I am not sure. The one I am most interested in, though, is his other sister. I believe this is the sister that entered the Netherlands the first, perhaps together with the sister that stayed here.

2. Finish my research into Lodewijk Wesselo and write his biography (both the Dutch and the English version)

I have all the documents, I just need to transcribe some of it (yes, still), then I am free to write his biography.

3. Visit the two local graveyards in search of my ancestors graves.

One I am visiting tomorrow, I am not sure what I will find there. The other one has a very searchable site, so I know who I am going to find there, just need to find the time to go there. It's a bit further away.

4. Finish filing all my documents.

It's just one box. One full box, but still, just one box. Four months, should be doable, right?

Family Sheet Adolph Knura

2010-09-03T16:06:00.003+02:00

Adolph (Dolf) Knura, born 1 July 1914, Bottrop, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, died 30 January 1990, Leiden, Zuid-Holland

Married Henriette Geertruida Lamboo, born 15 December 1913, Zoeterwoude, Zuid-Holland, died 27 December 2004, 's Gravenhage, Zuid-Holland, on 11 May 1938 in Voorschoten, Zuid-Holland

Children from this marriage:

a. My Aunt
b. My Other Aunt
c. My Uncle
d. My Other Uncle
e. Yet Another Uncle
f. Lambertus Johannes Adolphus (Bertje) Knura (1955-1961)
g. My Mother

Family Sheet Bergmann Josef Knura

2010-09-03T15:51:00.003+02:00

Bergmann Josef Knura born 1879 (?) Germany (?), died after 1928 in Bottrop, Germany (?)

Married Sophia Zbieszczyk born 7 febr 1884 (?) Germany or Poland (?), died Bottrop, Germany (?)

Children from this marriage:

a. Anna Knura (1905-1994)
b. Maria Knura (1908-?)
c. Adolph Knura (1914-1990)
d. Paul Knura (?-?)
e. E. Knura (?-?)
f. Karl Knura (?-?)
g. Ger Knura (?-?)
h. Miel (?-?)

Amenuensis Monday

2010-08-30T23:55:00.003+02:00

When an Archive Is Nothing More Than a Pile of Boxes

2010-08-27T22:38:00.003+02:00

Archives are wonderful. The people there are (almost) always helpful, willing to point you in the right direction, asnwering questions and searching endlessly for something you know has to be there, but can't find. So, like I said, archives are wonderful.

Except when they aren't. Except when an archive is just a fancy name for a pile of boxes with papers in them, where even the people working there have no clue what's in the archives. When the answer to every question you ask is: ask someone else. When they don't even have an archivist, just a bunch of people behind computers dealing with modern day generated paperwork who just happen to answer the phone if you call the archive.

Can you tell I'm frustrated? To go to this archive, I need to make an appointment and I need to know what to look for, as searching 128 meters of archive is simply undoable without a clue, yet they can't tell me what they have, even globally!

Sigh. I guess I'll go to the town historicus, who thankfully lives two houses down from me. After all, he's the one the people at the archive go to if they need to find something!

Another Piece of the Migration Puzzle

2010-08-26T23:18:00.001+02:00

I’ve been working on the Knura family migration for awhile. They migrated from Germany to the Netherlands. My grandfather came over in the 1930’s and I speculated on his reasons in my post Immigration Speculation. I also reconstructed the migration of the entire Knura family. My grandfather’s brothers came and went, their reasons were simple, they came here for a long or a short while to work then returned home.

But what surprised me was that it weren’t the Knura men who came here first. It were two Knura sisters, Anna and Maria, who arrived here sometime before 1925. I couldn’t figure out why two young, unmarried women came to a foreign country. Until I discovered a new website devoted to migration to and from the Netherlands.

Between 1920 and 1940 thousands of German women came to the Netherlands to work as servants in Dutch homes. Some of them eventually went back to Germany, like Maria. Others fell in love and married Dutch men and stayed for the rest of their lives, like Anna.

This site has given me another piece of the migration puzzle that is presented to me by the Knura family. It even gives lists of resources about the subject. There’s a whole book devoted to this subject and I got it through Interlibrary Loan. Hopefully it will give me some ideas as to where to search for Anna and Maria’s entry into the country. For now, I am glad I have at least a partial answer as to what brought these two women to this country.

The Limits of Online Research – A Case File

2010-08-23T18:27:00.002+02:00

For the 97th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, the assignment was to put 3-5 hours of online genealogy research into a family line of a friend or co-worker. Something nobody had ever worked on before. I’ve always found it fun to just see where online databases take me, so I was excited about this theme!

However, very quickly into my journey I realized that I wasn’t so much discovering the ancestors of my friend, I was seeing in practice the limits that exist when one does their genealogy research online. Come join me on my journey and I’ll show you what walls I bumped into!

The Beginning

My research started with the bare minimum of facts. I had the name of my starting person, let’s call him ‘Jan’ and when he’d died. I also knew his wife ‘Nelie’ had died after him, date unknown. I planned to see how far back I could fill in the family tree with the basic facts: birth, marriage and death.

My research started off pretty well. On the site of the Regional Archive Leiden I found the birth certificate, marriage certificate and death certificate of Jan. There were no scanned images for me to look at, but the index of the marriage certificate mentioned their ages and birth place, as well as the names of their parents.

Wall Number One

Hoping to find something on Jan’s parents, I searched for them in the database. I found their marriage certificate, but the index didn’t mention anything besides the place and date of the marriage, and of course their names. No image was available. I’d hit a dead end on Jan’s father. With no further data, as I couldn’t find his birth or his death certificate, I couldn’t go any further back. I had no way to find his parents.

This was the first wall I encountered. Had I ordered the copy of the marriage certificate, I would have found more data. His age and birthplace would’ve been listed, and most likely his parent’s names. But since it wasn’t in the index on the site and I couldn’t access the images online, I was stuck.

For Jan’s mother I was a little more lucky. I did find her birth and death certificate, but once again the index didn’t say anything about her parents and the images weren’t available online. I couldn’t go any further back unless I ordered a copy of the certificates I had found.

More Luck With Nelie?

From the marriage certificate of Jan and Nelie, I had found out Nelie’s age and birthplace, so I decided to see if I would have more luck tracing her ancestors. For this I had to go to a different online archive, the Green Hart Archives. This archive does not have any digital images, but it has a different index, so I was hopeful.

I quickly located Nelie’s birth certificate, which mentioned her parent’s names and the age of her father. With this information I found the marriage certificate of her parent’s Klaas and Antje, and the birth certificate of Klaas. No death certificates were located for either of them. I couldn’t find Antje’s birth certificate, but from the information on her marriage certificate I do know her approximate birth year, her birthplace and her parent’s name.

Wall Number Two

I decided to research the parents of Klaas first. I found their marriage certificate, which gave me their birthplaces, approximate birth years, names of their parents and birthplaces of their parents. This is where the trail ends for this line. No more certificates were to be found.

For Antje’s parents, it was almost the same. I did find their birth certificates, along with their marriage certificate. But the information on their parents was the same.

The problem? The certificates I needed had not yet been indexed on the site! All of the missing certificates were ones that hadn’t been indexed yet. So while the index was superb, it couldn’t tell me about certificates that hadn’t been indexed yet!

To find this information, I would have to take a physical trip to the archive that holds these certificates. There I would have to locate the microfiches and search them for the certificates I want.

The Lesson I Learned

All in all, this was a very practical lesson in the limitations of online genealogy. The two walls I encountered are the ones that are exactly why a lot of genealogists don’t put much stock in online research except as a nice starting point.

One: no online images means you get are totally reliant on what the index on the site says, which is woefully little most times!

Two: you cannot find online what hasn’t been indexed yet!

A lot of pro-internet genealogists admit that secondary sources are often not found online. But this enlightening trip through the online indexes has left me with one thing in mind. There are a lot, and I do mean a lot, of primary sources not yet online as well. Not to mention that from the sources that are online, a lot of information is missed out on if you just take what the index on the site says instead of looking at the actual certificate.

As for me? I love spending the whole day in an archive. Internet is wonderful for contacts and sharing with the world, but for my research the old way is truly best.

Amenuensis Monday - Lodewijk's Jewelry Store During World War One

2010-08-23T09:32:00.001+02:00

Besides a lot of letters, Lodewijk Wesselo also wrote a brief autobiogrpahy (2 pages). In it, he describes his career, among other things. He tells briefly about the time he was the manager of a store in Middelburg during the period 1912-1920. He sold jewelry and objects made of precious metals like gold and silver. He wrote about this store: "thanks to the First World War, the business florished."

I found this to be a rather strange statement. To my knowledge, the Dutch economy took a heavy hit during the First World War. The Netherlands were neutral, which made all countries that were at war hesitant to trade with the Netherlands, afraid as they were that the goods they exported to the Netherlands would fall into enemy hands. Since the Dutch economy is heavily dependant on import and export, it took a heavy blow. Even later on, when trading with the countries like England resumed, it was under heavy restrictions to prevent anything valuable from falling into German hands.

So how could a high ends good store do so well? Base materials to make the products were almost impossible to get during World War Two, and I expected it to be the same during the First World War. Not to mention that many people wouldn't have had the money to buy anything on offer in the store.

I asked for clarification on this issue on a Dutch forum devoted to the First World War.

The first part of the answer came from one reply. During the First World War, there were a lot of Belgian refugees that came to the Netherlands. This person suggested that the Belgian refugees were perhaps selling their valuables to get some form of income. Since Middelburg is close to the Belgian border, it's very possible this was happening.

The second part of the answer came from someone else, and was in hindsight so obvious I should've thought of it myself. His reply to my query was that in times of crisis, people invested in valuables like gold because the value of that is much more stable than the value of money. So there we had the sales part.

Lastly, one of the moderators gave me the link to a book with several essays about the economy in the Netherlands during the First World War, which was an interesting and enlightening read.

So my thanks go out to the lovely people who responded so very quickly to my question. I learned a lot!

Number Mystery - Not Solved Yet...

2010-08-22T09:08:00.003+02:00

In my last Amenuensis Monday post, I wrote about the letter/number code Lodewijk Wesselo used in his letters. I asked on some genealogy forums for help, since I couldn't figure out what the code was.

I recieved some helpful answers. Someone suggested that it was the Medieval Roman numerals system. It nearly fit, but not completely. Some of the numbers don't add up and Lodewijk used a letter that's not in that system. So no luck there. Unles of course I used the system wrong, which is entirely possible.

Someone else though, provided me with some historical background information that might shed some light on why he was using a code. Here's what she said:

Many history-making events took place in the Netherlands around this time in both financial and illicit trade areas. Maybe your ancestor wished to separate himself from all the scandal by not making his figures available to just anyone?

He did use the code during the 20's, and also in letters sent during World War 2, where discretion also had its place. And besides that, from what I've been able to glean from his character by reading his letters, he was a very discreet and conservative man when it came to money matters.

I might not ever crack his code, but at least I have a reasonable explanation as to why he used one in the first place!

Rewarding Myself

2010-08-21T21:01:00.004+02:00

On Thursday I spent half a day at the CBG Archive, transcribing the last of the letters written by Lodewijk Wesselo. I now have to type them out on my computer and input the information contained in them into my genealogy program. It's a sometimes tedious job and very labour intensive. What starts out as fun quickly grows less fun as you work hour after hour, with only three or four letters to show for it at the end.

The situation seems even more daunting when you realize that out of the 12 children there are, Lodewijk is only the first one you've done this for. That means there are 11 more children to go!

But I've found a way of rewarding myself. I've given myself permission to write Lodewijk's biography after I've transcribed and inputted all of the data about him. Yes, it's probably better to wait until after I've gone through the whole Wesselo archive, but seeing as there are 6 boxes, that could take a while.

I've got most of the information, and I don't think there are any surprises waiting for me about Lodewijk when I go through the information on his siblings and parents. Maybe some clarifications, yes, but no real surprises.

So, tomorrow I'll do the last of the letters. And then I am free to write, which I love to do. Turning his life into a story that can be read by my family, combining my love for writing and genealogy. That's my ultimate goal. And I've put the entire Monday aside for that. Lucky me!

Amenuensis Monday: Letters From Lodewijk Wesselo - Part I

2010-08-16T07:08:00.000+02:00

I have been busy these past few days with transcribing seven letters written by Lodewijk Wesselo to his brother Willem Lodewijk Wesselo and his wife Wilhelmina Kwak. There's also a telegram which is part of this correspondence, giving the message that their mother, Alida Petronella van Grasstek, had died. They were written while Willem and his wife were in the Dutch East-Indies, where Willem was working as a manager for the same firm as Lodewijk himself was.

All of the letters, save one, was handwritten and as such sometimes there were indecipherable words. Not even so much because of the handwriting, I've gotten to be quite proficient at reading that, but because the ink is sometimes so faded it's just not legible anymore. But then again, the letters are all from 1925, which is 85 years ago.

Most of the letters follow a general pattern, there's some family news, news about business and some general gossip of friends and acquintances. But there are three exceptions. They are the last three letters and detail the death and funeral of Alida Petronella van Grasstek. It's a blow-by-blow account of this time and I could see everything in my mind. It was as if I were there. It's an invaluable account and I am very, very happy to have it.

Number code mystery, please help!

There is, however, one mystery. In almost every letter he writes about his business. But he doesn't write out the numbers of the profits he makes, instead he uses some sort of code. It's not Roman numbers and it's not just a letter for number substitution (like a=1, b=2). I am hoping some of you might have an idea?

Some background: Lodewijk is manager of a store for jewelry, and objects of gold, silver and other precious metals. The profits are quite high, one number he does write out in normal numbers is in his letter from 15 March 1925, where he says: "No business news, today I've already passed 25 thousand." The only other time is in the piece below.

The bit where he's written his profits in code is in a letter dated 7 March 1925:

"Nevertheless, sales are good. Februari ƒ iij,- and in total these first two months ƒ ijnhh,- higher than in '24. This week is especially good. I sold stuff for 6 thousand over the counter and on order 3 necklaces and 5 tie pins, total ƒ ihnhh,-."

A little later, he says:

"This afternoon, I was in Den Haag for business, where I had the last laugh. Their turnover last week was ƒ ouhh,- and mine was ƒ zehh,-."

Talking With My Grandmother

2010-08-09T20:10:00.002+02:00

When I started my genealogy research, there were several surprises waiting for me. One of them was the fact that my grandmother had three brothers. I knew of one brother, Great-Uncle J., but not of the other two. Further research showed me they both died during World War II.

My grandmother never talked about them and since I had no idea what exactly had happened, I was hesitant to ask about it. But a few weeks back, I was walking her home from the restaurant we’d eaten dinner at and we came upon an antique shop. There were several silver photograph frames in the window and my grandmother pointed to one of them that held an old photo of a group of children. She said that the boy dressed in a sailor suit looked a bit like her brother. I grabbed the opportunity and asked her: “you had three, didn’t you?”

She not only answered affirmatively, but the story of their deaths came forth. Her sister’s M.’s husband (then just boyfriend, if I understood my grandmother correctly) had contracted tuberculosis and infected the family. Her sister M., her sister J. and her three brothers all came down with the disease. And while her sisters and brother J. recovered, the other two succumbed to it, one dying a few years before the other, but both dying of this disease.

Another mystery solved, another story uncovered.

Unscheduled Hiatus

2010-08-04T16:16:00.001+02:00

As you have probably noticed, there was an unscheduled hiatus in my posting here. I was pretty ill, so my research had to be put on hold for the moment. I am feeling better now, even though my health isn't where it's supposed to be yet. However, I am taking a holiday first, to the beautiful city Rome. Regular posting will begin again next week when I'll be back!

Searching for Photographs

2010-07-14T22:46:00.002+02:00

In my Amenuensis Monday post of last Monday I transcribed a letter in which descriptions of four photographs were given. These photo's were gifted to the City Archive of Middelburg, which is now a part of the Zeeland Archives. I wrote to them about a week ago asking if they could help me trace these pictures.

Yesterday I got a reply. They have been trying to find these photo's, but at the moment they aren't having much luck. They have not yet been digitalized, or if they were, they cannot be found using search terms provided by the descriptions.

The letter of the archivist, which states that they have been added to the collection, has been found, but which collection they were added to is not stated. They photographs also do not appear on the list of acquired items of 1988, the year in which they were added to the collection.

But, there is still hope. The archivist that got the letter and the photographs and wrote that they had been added to the collection still works for the Zeeland Archives. He's currently on holiday, but my enquiry has been forwarded to him. I hope that he might be able to find the photographs, once he returns from his holiday.

For now, all I can do is wait patiently...

Amenuensis Monday: Letter with Descriptions of Photo's

2010-07-12T20:01:00.002+02:00

I'm joining in Amenuensis Monday, the weekly blogging theme hosted by John Newark of Transylvanian Dutch Genealogy. I will transcribe and translate documents, the transcriptions will go directly into my genealogy database and the translations will be posted here. The translations will be in modern language with modern spelling, as it's hard enough to translate already!

My current project is the Wesselo family documents of the generations I am researching this year. I'm starting with Lodewijk Wesselo, the eldest son of the second marriage of Hendrik Wesselo, and his wife Elisabeth Lubach.

This week a translation of a letter found in the family archive Wesselo at the CBG. It was written by D.J. Wesselo, the man who eventually gave the archive to the CBG. The recipient was the archivist of the city archive Middelburg. Included where four photographs, which were added to the collection of the archive according to a short letter also in the family archive. This last letter did not contain any usefull information, so I did not transcribe it.

Translation of letter written bij D.J. Wesselo to the Archive of Middelburg, dated 22 August 1988

From the estate of my cousin, Ms. Antje Wesselo – born in Voorschoten on 1 Novemeber 1902 and deceased in Rotterdam on 19 October 1986 – are the included memories of her from the period 1912-1920 when she lived with her parents in the city Middelburg. Because I did not see the usefulness of including these pictures in my family archive and on the other hand didn’t think it was sensible to destroy them, I thought it would be a good idea to offer them to you. Perhaps you know of someone who would appreciate them, if they are of no value to the city archive.

The father of the above named Antje was in the previously stated period the manager of the branch office of the Edelmetaalbedrijven van Kempen, of which the branch office in Middelburg was situated on the Lange Delft. Although Middelburg is virtually unknown to me, I was able to tracé this place with the help of the family pictures and letters I have in my possession. Accompanying the pictures:

I Previously this jewelry store was managed by one Mr. Van Gorcum en after Mr. Wesselo left in 1920 the store was sold to Mr. R. Verhoog. At which occasion this parade on the Lange Delft was held is unclear to me – on the back of the photograph is written: Middelburg 27/5 ’12. Considering the flags hanging from the front of the houses it must have been held for the occasion of a national occasion, at which the band ‘Mozart’ from Ierseke (with banner) provided her cooperation. On this photograph is on the left side the branch store of van Kempen visible, from which from the upstairs windows the family Wesselo shows their appreciation;
II Who Mr. De John is according to the backside is unclear to me, as is the place where the picture was taken;
III Is most likely a postcard pciture, which you might know from commercial sales;
IV Given the later added canopy roof, this picture will date from after 1912 (compare to picture I)

I hope that I have given you pleasure with the sending of these photographs.

Kindly,

D.J. Wesselo

Notes:

1. We learn two vital dates here for Antje Wesselo: her birth in Voorschoten on 1 Novemeber 1902 and her death in Rotterdam on 19 October 1986. Especially the last one is of interest, as the death certificate will not be public until 50 years after someone is deceased.
2. We learn that Lodewijk and his family lived in Middelburg from 1912-1920, when he was manager of the branch office of the Edelmetaalbedrijven (translation: precious metal companies) van Kempen, of which the branch office in Middelburg was situated on the Lange Delft.
3. On 27 May 1912, the family was already in Middelburg, and there was a parade, most likely for a national occasion. I’ve googled it, but have been unable to find what that might have been.
4. I have written to the Zeeland Archives, of which the city archive of Middelburg is now a part, in hopes they still have these pictures and are able to help me identify them. I hope to hear from them within the next two weeks.

Source:

Familiearchieven: CBG, fa 00472, familiearchief Wesselo, Doos 1, portfolio 1. "Letter to city archive Middelburg"

What To Do: Chronological or by Topic?

2010-07-08T18:51:00.003+02:00

I am almost through with gathering all of the material about Lodewijk Wesselo and when I am, I will start writing his story in a biography-like format. I have massive amounts of information and I have been thinking about how to approach this. I see two possibilities, each with their own benefits and downsides.

First there is doing it chronologically. I can start with his birth, his early work career, his marriage and children, late work career, some moves in between... Most of the things I have are dated and I have a fairly full timeline.

The benefit of doing it this way is clear, you can read the story and see his life unfold before your eyes. The downside? Not all of the information is dated, so some of the absolute gems of things I found I cannot accurately place on the timeline. For instance, I know he worked on an amazing project sometime before 1920, but when you take into account he started working in 1887, that's not saying much. So where do I put that? If it was just one instance, I would just guess, but there are more examples of this problem.

I could also do it by topic. I could do family life, extended family, religion, work, and health. With these topics I would be able to place every bit of information I have.

The benefits? The spare bits of information I have, those without a specific date, can be far more accurately placed within their given sub-topic. Most of the information I have is actually already arranged according to this pattern, so it's easy for me to organize it like this. The downside, of course, is that you might lose sight of Lodewijk's timeline like this, because while you can do the work topic chronologically, when you go to the next topic, you'd have to start at the beginning of his life again. I'm afraid of losing coherency between the subjects.

As of yet, I am still undecided. What are your thoughts on this? Which would work better in this case?

After 32 Years...

2010-07-06T22:57:00.002+02:00

we have once again reached the finals of the World Cup!

I my post on last Tuesday I mentioned having to go up to Brazil, and we won! Tonight we played Uruguay and once again we won!

In the finals we will be playing against either Germany or Spain, which will be decided tomorrow.

We lost the World Cup final of 1974 against Germany and there's a love-hate relationship with our neighbors. It would give us a chance to take our revenge, but honestly, I'd rather we played against Spain. I'm afraid it will be Germany though...

Sunday is the day of the final, the day of reckoning. Will I see history being written then? Who knows?

Amenuensis Monday: Children Lodewijk Wesselo and Elizabeth Lubach

2010-07-05T07:27:00.002+02:00

I'm joining in Amenuensis Monday, the weekly blogging theme hosted by John Newark of Transylvanian Dutch Genealogy. I will transcribe and translate documents, the transcriptions will go directly into my genealogy database and the translations will be posted here. The translations will be in modern language with modern spelling, as it's hard enough to translate already!

My current project is the Wesselo family documents of the generations I am researching this year. I'm starting with Lodewijk Wesselo, the eldest son of the second marriage of Hendrik Wesselo, and his wife Elisabeth Lubach.

Lodewijk and Elisabeth had three children, a son Hendrik who died seven days after he was born, a stillborn son and a daughter named Antje. Antje was the only one of the three children who lived to adulthood. She stayed single and died on 19 October 1986 in Rotterdam.

Today I’ve transcribed and translated the birth and death certificates of Lodewijk and Elisabeth’s children, in as far as they are available to the public. Italics are handwritten, the rest is printed.

Birth Certificate Hendrik Wesselo

In the year nineteen hundred on the twenty-third of the month April appeared before us, civil servant of the municipal registry of Voorschoten Lodewijk Wesselo, old twenty-four years, with the profession goldsmith living here, who has stated that on the twenty-first of the month April of this year in the afternoon at half past one hours, in this town in the house quarter A number nine a was born a child of the male sex, from his wife Elisabeth Lubach without profession living in his own house, which shall be named: Hendrik
This statement was made in the presence of Hendrik Wesselo, old fifty-nine years, with the profession silversmith, and of Dirk Lubach, old sixty years, with the profession silversmith, living both here
After reading it out loud this certificate was signed by us with the appearer and the witnesses

Notes:
1. Hendruk Wesselo is the father of Lodewijk
2. Dirk Lubach is the father of Elisabeth

Death Certificate Hendrik Wesselo

In the year nineteen hundred on the twenty-eight of the month April appeared before us, civil servant of the municipal registry of Voorschoten: Lodewijk Wesselo, old twenty-four years, with the profession goldsmith living here father of the hereafter named deceased and Hendrik Wesselo, old fifty-nine years, with the profession goldsmith living here grandfather of the deceased, who stated that on the twenty-eight of the month April of this year, in the afternoon at seven hours, in this town in the house quarter A number nine a has died Hendrik Wesselo, old seven days, with the profession without, born and living here son of the first appearer and of Elisabeth Lubach without profession living here
After reading aloud this certificate was signed by us with the appearers

Notes
1. The profession goldsmith given for Hendrik Wesselo is probably a mistake by the clerk who filled in the certificate. All other sources state that Hendrik was a silversmith, including the birth certificate given out not seven days before. Since Lodewijk is a goldsmith, the error is easily made.

Death Certificate NN Wesselo

In the year nineteen hundred and one on the ninth of the month October appeared before us, civil servant of the municipal registry of Voorschoten: Lodewijk Wesselo, old twenty-five years, with the profession goldsmith living here and Huibert van Kooij, old fifty-three years, with the profession state policeman living here, who stated that on the eight of the month October of this year, in the afternoon at one hours, in this town in the house quarter A number twelve has given birth to a child of the male sex Elisabeth Lubach, with the profession without and living here wife of the first appearer which child they declare stillborn
After reading aloud this certificate was signed by us with the appearers

Notes:
1. Between the death of Hendrik and the birth of their stillborn son, they either moved from number 9a to 12, or the houses in the quarter were re-numbered. To know this for sure, a visit to the land office is needed.
2. There’s a side note about the approval of the crossing out of the pre-printed text that was adapted to the declaring of a stillborn.

Birth Certificate Antje Wesselo

In the year nineteen hundred and two on the third of the month November appeared before us, civil servant of the municipal registry of Voorschoten Lodewijk Wesselo, old twenty-six years, with the profession goldsmith living here, who has stated that on the first of the month November of this year in the afternoon at half past seven hours, in this town in the house quarter A number twelve was born a child of the female sex, from his wife Elisabeth Lubach without profession living in his own house, which shall be named: Antje
This statement was made in the presence of Hendrik Wesselo, old sixty-two years, with the profession silversmith, and of Dirk Lubach, old sixty-two years, with the profession silversmith, living both here
After reading it out loud this certificate was signed by us with the appearer and the witnesses approving the crossing out of the word fourth

Notes:
1. The word crossed out fourth was written in front of the word third.

Sources:

1. Hendrik Wesselo entry, Geboorteakte, BS Voorschoten: Akte Jaar 1900 Nummer 25, Digitale Stamboom Regionaal Archief Leiden, Leiden, Zuid-Holland.
2. Hendrik Wesselo entry, BS Voorschoten Overlijdensakte, Akte Jaar 1900 Nummer 12, Digitale Stamboom Regionaal Archief Leiden, Leiden, Zuid-Holland.
3. NN Wesselo entry, BS Voorschoten Overlijdensakte, Akte Jaar 1901 Nummer 26, Digitale Stamboom Regionaal Archief Leiden, Leiden, Zuid-Holland.
4. Antje Wesselo entry, Geboorteakte, BS Voorschoten: Akte Jaar 1902 Nummer 72, Digitale Stamboom Regionaal Archief Leiden, Leiden, Zuid-Holland.

The Dutch National Football Team

2010-06-29T17:19:00.003+02:00

First Match

The Dutch National Football Team played their first international match on 30 April 1905 against our southern neighbor Belgium. At the end of the official playing time the score was 1-1, but in the extra time three more goals were made by Eddy de Neve, causing the Netherlands to win with 4-1.

1. First national team of the Netherlands

Greatest Results

The greatest accomplishment to date was winning the European Championship in 1988 which was held in West-Germany. The final was played against the Sovjet-Union. Only two goals were made, both by the Netherlands.

My aunt F. and uncle G. were here during that match. Uncle G. is an Australian and they both live in Australia. My father tells me that during the match the streets were silent, no cars passed, no people, nothing. The entire country was watching the match. When the end signal was given and we were the champion everyone streamed out into the streets, cheering, honking the horns of their cars. My uncle was amazed at the joy of the people, all decked out in orange. I’m sure it must’ve been an amazing, if slightly weird, sight.

When it comes to World Cups, we’re not so lucky. Twice we made the finals, in 1974 and again in 1978, but both times we lost. Once from West-Germany and once from Argentina.

The Color Orange

The Netherlands national football team play in a bright orange shirt. Orange is the historic national color of the Netherlands, originating from the coat of arms of the Dutch founding father William of Orange-Nassau. The top red band of the current flag was originally orange. The current Dutch away shirt is white, with two thin lines outlining a chevron containing the colors of the Dutch flag. Occasionally, orange socks are worn instead of light blue socks, such as in the qualifier against Scotland on March 28, 2009. (1) It’s not strange then, that one of the nicknames of the team is Oranje; the Dutch word for Orange.

2. Dutch supporters during the World Cup 2006

World Cup 2010

In the group stage of this World Cup we won all three matches, against Denmark, Japan and Cameroon; in that order. We only got one goals against us, originating from a penalty. In the first match of the knock-out stage, we played Slovakia. We won, meaning we are now through to the quarter-finals. They’re being played this Friday against Brazil.
Brazil is a dangerous opponent and we can only hope and pray that we’ll win…

Sources:

1. Wikipedia entry Dutch National Football Team

Photo credits:

2. Dan Kamminga, Haarlem, The Netherlands. Taken from the Wikipedia Commons

Amenuensis Monday: Lodewijk Wesselo and Elizabeth Lubach

2010-06-28T09:55:00.002+02:00

Sentimental Sunday: Dog Days...

2010-06-27T07:42:00.000+02:00

In 1994 my parents brought home a dog; Blacky. He was one and a half years old, a crossbreed between a black labrador and a German Shepperd. Within moments I, seven years old then, was playing with him in our garden with an old tennis ball. With this proof that he was good with kids, the decision was made by my parents to keep him.

But even that day, we got the suspicion he hadn't been treated very well in his old home. He would startle badly if you touched him when he didn't see it coming and he was deadly afraid of water, so we think he was punished by being hosed down with cold water. Not to mention his fear of abandoment. All of this, except his fear of water, got better with time, but that didn't help us in the beginning.

The day after we got Blacky, we were going to visit my uncle T. and his family in Noord-Brabant, which was a good two hour drive. We would stay there all day and then go back. We decided to take Blacky, as we didn't want to leave him alone all day just yet. So, in the car he went, grudginly, I might add.

What the poor dog must've been thinking we'll never know, but I can make an educated guess. He was terrified and probably thought we were going to bring him back to his first home. He stuck like glue to my father all day. My father moved one step left, Blacky moved one step left. It would've been funny if it hadn't been so sad.

But, as with all things, once he started trusting us, it got better. And then his mischievous side emerged. He did things like stealing the cake of a plate with all kinds of snacks. Just the cake, mind you, he'd carefully nosed the other treats aside!

Also, one time a little piece of raisin bread was left over. My Mom had placed it, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, on a low shelf in the kitchen. We placed stuff there all the time, and never had any problems. That evening, my mother asked my father why he couldn't have thrown the wrapping away if he ate the last piece of bread. While she was berating him, Blacky very slowly snuck out of the room. Well, nobody had to ask who the real perp was!

Christmas 2005 was the beginning of the end. He stood up and swaggered, almost falling several times. It was like he'd had a stroke. He was still a bit sick the next day, but soon after he was better. Age had made him slow, but he was twelve by then, quite old for a dog.

Everything seemed to be fine, until May 2006. My final exams were just finished when the trouble started. He kept throwing up and hardly ate. He was truly as sick as a dog and my parents took him to the vet. The verdict was that there was something wrong with his kidneys and that the best thing to do was euthanase him. The last day, we fed him everything he liked, like cheese and liver and french fries. He threw it all up, but at least he ate something. I said goodbye at home and then my parents took him to the vet.

Sometimes I still miss him, but I can honestly say I do not miss going out in the rain for a walk! He was a good friend, a good companion and he gave me many years of joy. I never would've wanted to miss it for the world.

Family Sheet Lodewijk Wesselo

2010-06-26T18:46:00.002+02:00

Lodewijk Wesselo, born 22 December 1875 in Voorschoten, died 18 February 1962 in Rotterdam

Married Elisbeth Lubach, born 31 October 1873 in Voorschoten, died 12 February 1952 in Rotterdam, on 13 July 1899 in Voorschoten.

Children from this marriage:

1. Hendrik Wesselo, born 21 April 1900 in Voorschoten, died 28 april 1900 in Voorschoten, 7 days old.
2. NN Wesselo, born and died 8 October 1901 in Voorschoten. Stillborn.
3. Antje Wesselo, born 1 November 1902 in Voorschoten, died 19 October 1986 in Rotterdam, 83 years old.

Family Sheet Hendrik Wesselo

2010-06-26T18:32:00.004+02:00

Hendrik Wesselo born 18 August 1840, Utrecht, died 14 October 1905, Voorschoten

1. Married Anthonia Tulp, born 27 January 1837, Utrecht, died 15 April 1872, Voorschoten, on 18 May 1864 in Utrecht.

Children from this marriage:

a. Johannes (Johan) Wesselo, born 5 February 1865, Voorschoten
b. Gijsbert Anthonie Wesselo, born 12 March 1866, Voorschoten
c. Johanna Wilhelmina (Hans, Jo) Wesselo, born 19 October 1868, Voorschoten
d. Alida Maria Wesselo, born 28 August 1870, Voorschoten

2. Married Alida Petronella van Grasstek, born 13 December 1852, Amsterdam, died 10 March 1925, Voorschoten, on 28 February 1875 in Voorschoten.

Children from this marriage:

e. Lodewijk (Lo) Wesselo, born 22 December 1875 in Voorschoten
f. Jan Jerphaas (Jan) Wesselo, born 19 August 1877 in Voorschoten
g. Wilhelmina Gerredina (Wim) Wesselo, born 19 August 1877 in Voorschoten
h. Jannetje (Jans) Wesselo, born 1 January 1882 in Voorschoten
i. Abraham Bernardus (Bram) Wesselo, born 21 January 1884 in Voorschoten
j. Alida Petronella (Alie) Wesselo, born 6 June 1886 in Voorschoten
k. Gerredina Eleonora (Dien) Wesselo, born 17 March 1889 in Voorschoten
l. Willem Lodewijk (Wim) Wesselo, born 3 January 1893 in Voorschoten

Wordless Wednesday - Minor Flooding

2010-06-23T17:20:00.005+02:00

Minor flooding in front of our house in the fall of 2002, after heavy rain. It didn't damage our house, but it did flood some of the lower lying houses in the street. It took several hours after the rain stopped for the water levels to drop.

Amenuensis Monday: Lodewijk Wesselo and Elizabeth Lubach

2010-06-21T07:53:00.003+02:00

Immigration Speculation

2010-06-20T18:25:00.002+02:00

When looking at ancestors who have immigrated, it’s good to realize that there are always reasons. Nobody ever packs up his entire live to go and live in a different country ‘just because’. Sometimes, it’s because they moved away from something, like bad economic circumstances, persecution or famine. Other times, it’s because they moved towards something, like a new job, new opportunities or freedom. Most of the times, it’s a combination of the two.

It’s rare that we can ask the ancestors who moved to a new country why they did so. Sometimes they are still alive to ask, sometimes they left documents that state those reasons. But most of the times, we can only speculate. And maybe we come close to the real reason when we do this.

My grandfather Adolph Knura was born in Bottrop, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Nordrhein-Westfalen borders the Netherlands in the east and Bottrop is right in the middle of the highly industrial Rurh-area. My grandfather was born in 1914 and left Bottrop in 1932. He moved to Voorschoten, Zuid-Holland, the Netherlands, all the way in the west. Today I take a look at the reasons he might’ve had to move away from Bottrop and the reasons he might’ve had to move to Voorschoten.

Away from Bottrop

The Great Depression begins in Oktober 1929 in the US, but quickly spreads across the world. In Europe, Germany and Austria are hit particularly hard because they have huge loans after World War I, due to having to pay damages. In March 1931, France demands all loans be payed back immediately, which causes the complete collapse of German industry. When 1932 begins, there are around six million people unemployed. In Bottrop, the economic crisis is also felt. One of the mines closed in 1930, causing a lot of people to become unemployed.
My grandfather might’ve had trouble finding a job, causing him to move in search of employment.

Another cause might be found in the mining industry. Bottrop and the surrounding area relied heavily on the mining industry to provide jobs. In fact, my grandfather’s father and brothers were miners. But mining is very dangerous. Chronic lung diseases such as black lung were very common in miners in those days, leading to a reduced life expectancy. The mining itself also brought many dangers, like suffocation, gas poisoning, roof collapse and gas explosions.
According to my mother, my grandfather was very opposed to going to work in the mines. So this likely influenced his decision to move away from Bottrop.

The last reason he might’ve had to move away from Bottrop can be found in the politics of the time. In the beginning of 1932 a new government was elected, but the military refused to support the government, causing new elections to be written. It was these new elections, in July 1932, in which Hitler’s party became the leading party.
My grandfather left in February/March of 1932 and the political unrest of those days, perhaps with a bit of foreshadowing of what was to come, could’ve contributed to his decision to move.

So, in summary, the move away from Bottrop was most likely economical in motivation. My grandfather didn’t want to work in the mines and with the Great Depression, there were few other jobs in the area. The political unrest of the time might’ve been the final push to leave.

Towards Voorschoten

Now that we know why Adolph moved away from Bottrop, it’s good to take a look as to why he moved to Voorschoten. He did not stop anywhere along the way, he came directly to Voorschoten, clear across the country from where he entered it.

There’s a very good reason for that, and she goes by the name of Anna Knura; Adolph’s older sister. She was already living in Voorschoten and was married to Lambertus van Aken, who owned his own painting company. Adolph moved in with her for the first few months he was in Voorschoten and went to work as a painter in Lambertus’ company.
So, he came to Voorschoten knowing he had family here, a roof over his head for as long as he needed it, and a good prospect (if not a certainty) of a job.

Where there more reasons for this move? Perhaps.
Am I right in every reason I just mentioned? Very likely.
Will we ever know for sure? No.
Still, it’s a valuable exercise, as it colors in the events surrounding one of the most important decisions in Adolph Knura’s life.

Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Dangers_to_miners
2. Bingham, J., Chandler, F & Taplin, s. The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History. 2008.
3. Reader's Digest. Mijlpalen van de 20e eeuw. Amsterdam: The Reader's Digest, around 1980.

Knura Connection Or Not?

2010-06-19T22:06:00.003+02:00

When I was at the Central Bureau for Genealogy on April third of this year, I found a genealogy statement made during the German occupation. All police officers and several other civil servants were required to fill in a form stating their parents and grandparents, as well as their partners parents and grandparents, to prove they were not Jewish. In one such document, I found a possible connection to my grandfather Adolph Knura.

This particula document was the genealogy statement of Willem Frederik Hendrik Hendriks, whose wife is Augusta Martha Knura. Now here's where it gets interesting. Augusta was born in Bottrop, Germany on 17 April 1905, is Roman-Catholic and her parents are listed as Anton Knura, miner, deceased in Bottrop on 18 December 1914 and Victoria Durczak, deceased in Bottrop on 23 February 1941.

It seems to me that it is very, very coincidental that there is another Knura who's a miner in Bottrop without it being family of Bergmann Josef Knura, the father of Adolph, who was also a miner. Now here's the catch: I do not know the birth place or date of Bergmann, but I do know the birth place and date of Anton Knura! If they are indeed related, I can search for Bergmann Josef Knura in Anton's birth place and see if I find anything.

I know it's not much, and I'm not going to follow up on it for now, as there are easier ways to find out more about Bergmann Josef Knura. But if I hit a brick wall, I will certainly keep this in mind and if Bergmann and Anton do end up sharing the same birth place, I will look for the connection between the two, if there is one. It's just something to keep in mind!

Sentimental Sunday: Left-over Money

2010-05-23T21:28:00.001+02:00

I wrote about organizing a school dance with my friend J. in this post, and as mentioned there, we had some left-over money after returning the unopened bottles of soda. J. was the one who put the returned money in her wallet to return to the teacher, and I put it out of my mind. Never had I thought it would come back to nearly destroy our friendship.

A couple of months later, there was a big party for the first three grades of our high school. My friend J. had gotten money from her paternal grandmother to buy some clothes for the party. But, J.’s parents were divorced and her home situation was a bit weird. Her mother, whom she lived with, had this weird rule that whatever she got from her father (or that side of the family) was to stay at her father’s. So she basically had two separate lives. If she were to buy clothes from the money her grandmother had given her, she wouldn’t be able to wear them to the party because of this rule. So, we made the deal that we’d go together to buy clothes, I would take everything home with me. J. would spend the night of the party with me, so she could dress in the clothes without her mother finding out. My mother would wash them and J. would then smuggle them to her father’s house when she went there for the weekend, without anyone being the wiser.

We had a lot of fun buying the clothes, right until the end, when we were in the check-out line. J. saw a scarf she wanted to have too, but she didn’t have enough money to buy it. However, she remembered then that she still had the money from returning the soda bottles in her wallet. I was unhappy with the fact that she still hadn’t returned it, but she swore she’d give the teacher the money just as soon as she got her allowance the next week. There wasn’t a lot more I could say and she bought the scarf. The next week she did indeed pay the teacher back, the party was great, and that should’ve been the end of it. It wasn’t.

Sometime later, I think it was a week or two, I was watching a movie on the tv in my room. I can still remember what movie it was, because it was such a good movie, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, with Whoopi Goldberg. The movie hadn’t been going for more than fifteen minutes when my mother came upstairs with the phone, telling me J.’s mother wanted to talk to me. I took the phone call, and got a very angry mother on the phone. Apparently, she’d discovered the scarf J. had bought, hadn’t been happy that her daughter had bought it and had questioned her about it. J. had told her mother I had loaned her the money for it, which was in her eyes unacceptable, as I was thereby helping J. break the rules she’d set for her daughter. I was at first speechless, but then I became angry. It was one thing for me to keep my mouth shut about J. breaking rules, but it was something else entirely to have J. lie about my involvement to keep herself out of trouble. So I told J.’s mother everything, about the clothes, the borrowed money, and the party. J.’s mother apologized for getting angry at me and said she was going to have another talk with J. We hung up and I went back to watching the movie, still angry at J.

Half an hour later, the phone went again. This time it was J., in tears. I was still very mad at her and at first refused to take her phone call. My mother persuaded me to at least hear her out. I took the phone and J. apologized to me. I told her why I’d been so angry, and she promised never to put me in such a position again. I accepted her apology and we hung up.

Our friendship, however, never truly recovered from this incident. We stayed friends for another two years, but kept growing further and further apart. It didn’t help that her home situation worsened and that, looking back, she had a lot of problems with her self-image. In the end, I sat down with J. and told her I thought our friendship as it stood wasn’t working any longer. That I needed more space than she was giving me and that maybe it was best if we stopped being friends. She wasn’t happy about it, but she did agree. We parted ways amicably, still talked to each other once in a while, and greeted each other when we saw one another. Two years later, we graduated high school and I never saw her again. I do not miss our friendship, but I do hope that she’s in a better place than she was when we were friends.

Going Cross-eyed...But Finding Lost Stories

2010-05-21T19:57:00.003+02:00

Today I spent six hours in the archives of the Central Bureau for Genealogy transcribing letters and other documents for one of my ancestors, so all I'm seeing right now is letters slanted in a particular handwriting dancing in front of my eyes.

The Wesselo line, which is part of my paternal grandmother's line has been researched already and I had thought that I would just check the information that was already there, which was even more simple because all the information was supposed to be in one place: the Wesselo Family Archive at the Central Bureau for Genealogy and the published genealogy, also available in the library of the Central Bureau for Genealogy.

Yeah, maybe not so easy after all. Fitst of all, the book doesn't have any sources in it, so while it's a very pretty tree, it can't be verified. Luckily, there is still the Wesselo Family Archive, which should have all the documents on which the book was based. And it's true, there are a lot of documents in there, but there are many vital documents not present. So, I have to look them up seperately.

What I did find was scores and scores of interesting, story-telling sourced like letters and newspaper articles about the Wesselo family members. The book, and the site of a genealogy cousin that shares the Wesselo and Bolle ancestors with me, do not make any mention of this at all. They just list the birth, marriage and death dates, all marriages and the children. Also, they list the professions, very briefly. Sometimes it is listed where and when a person was burried. But where are the stories? Whole lives can be found in the letters and other documents, memories written down by the persons themselves, specifically for their descendants! Why aren't their stories being told?

So, what was supposed to be an 'easy' line to resreach, because it was just verifying for a large part, just became a monster job of transcribing, seeking out some additional records that are mentioned but not included in the Family Archive, and writing biographies. Why? Because their stories deserve to be told! The material is all there!

So, today I started with the oldest uncle of my grandmother for which there was material in the archive, and I started transcribing the letters he sent to his brother, and also the life story he wrote down specifically intended to go into the archive, as asked by the one who put the genealogy together. I'm not even half-way through transcribing his material, but it is very rewarding and I am finding gems of stories in these letters and other documents. What a shame they have never been told before! But do not fear, another day or two at the archive and I can begin telling his story!

Evaluate and Plan

2010-05-20T17:20:00.004+02:00

At the end of last year, I made six resolutions for this year, and I thought it was a good idea to evaluate them and make some plans as to what things are next on my To-Do list. Mostly, to prevent myself from going on (interesting!) tangents. So, let's take a look.

1. Get through with inputting all family info that I currently have in documents in my genealogy program.

I started out with two boxes and am now done to one. This doesn't, however, include any transcriptions, although everything is archived and cited. That's something I'm keeping for next year...

To-Do: finish inputting the documents in the last box.

2. Finish identifying and scanning all family pictures I have
I recently added more pictures to my stack, from a side of the family I had two pictures from. Now I've got a huge stack, but they are all identified, at least. They need to be scanned, and other than that I made little progress. Definitely something that needs more love and attention!

To-Do: set aside one Sunday afternoon every month to work on the pictures.

3. Develop research plans for the next phase of research, which is generation II (my parents), generation III (my grandparents) and generation IV (my great-grandparents)

I did make research plans, but they were tentative. I now have a lot more data, a lot more questions, and a lot more ideas about where to look for more data. So, I need to re-do these research plans!

To-Do: re-do research plans for generation II (parents), generation III (grandparents) and generation IV (great-grandparents)

4. Make a success of this blog by posting interesting post on Dutch or local history, my own research and family.

Well, I've been posting pretty regularly, which is really good considering how busy I sometimes get! I've made 60 posts already this year, and where not even half-way yet. I've posted pretty regularly about my own research and family, but local and Dutch history have no real posts as of yet. Something to change.

To-Do item: write some posts about local and Dutch history.

5. Get started on my two planned series.

I planned on two series, and I've started both of them. The Looking For Lamboo series is going well, but my Genealogy in the Netherlands series needs a little love!

To-Do: write more consistently for Genealogy in the Netherlands, keep writing The Looking For Lamboo series

6. Post my own memories

Well, I planned to do one a week. In all of this year, I've posted one memory, specifically written like that, and one memory as part of a biograhy I wrote about my grandmother. Wich means I'm about 18 memories behind, and that's not counting this week.

To-Do: start writing a memory every Sentimental Sunday, and play a bit of catch-up!

So, what does my To-Do list for the next couple of weeks look like?

1. Finish inputting the documents in the last box.
2. Set aside one Sunday afternoon every month to work on the pictures.
3. Re-do research plans for generation II (parents), generation III (grandparents) and generation IV (great-grandparents).
4. Write some posts about local and Dutch history.
5. Write more consistently for Genealogy in the Netherlands, keep writing The Looking For Lamboo series
6. Start writing a memory every Sentimental Sunday, and play a bit of catch-up!

Sounds do-able, doesn't it?

Mystery Pictures, Still No Luck....

2010-05-19T17:02:00.000+02:00

In this post, I wrote about two pictures I have of my grandmother, where she's shown as a member of an as of yet unidentified organization.

In hopes of finding out what this organization might be, and knowing in which time period and approximately where the photo was taken, and also knowing it had to have been a Roman Catholic organization, I send digital images of the two pictures to the local history museum of Voorschoten with the question if they had any idea what organization it could be.

In the second week of May I got an answer. They think my grandmother might have attended the boarding school 'Huize Bijdorp', which was a Roman Catholic school for young ladies from affluent families. There is however, doubt because of the man in one of the pictures, who clearly poses together with the girls, as the school was run by nuns and the only men that were there where the gardner and his help.

Together with that, I have my doubts also. First of all, while my grandmothers father had a good job, he was still only middle class, and didn't belong to the upper class, so it's highly unlikely that any of his daughters would've been sent to 'Huize Bijdorp'. Also, I know that my grandmother only did primary school, and the girls in the pictures look to be in their teens.

My own doubts, coupled with the doubts of the museum people, make me think this is not a picture of my grandmother attending 'Huize Bijdorp'. So, back to square one, with no idea what organization it is, and one less source to go to and ask.

29th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy

2010-05-17T23:15:00.002+02:00

Welcome to the 29th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy!

It's all about religion this time. Articles about religion as part of the life of an ancestor, sources about an ancestor that are connected to their religion, basically anything to do with religion.

The carnival kicks off at Ancestor Soup with the article Doing God's Work on the Prairie. "Nestled between cornfields southwest of Freeport, Illinois, sits a lasting reminder that Harriet Van Brocklin was there, and that she had faith."

The next stop is at The Internet Genealogist who brings us the article A Man on a Mission. "I often forget how big a role religion must have played in my ancestors lives, though only a little digging usually reveals their spiritual leanings (which I think says a lot for how important it must have been to them)."

Al's Polish-American Genealogy Research is the location of the next article Parish Communities. "One constant in all of my genealogy and historical research has been the importance of religion to my Polish ancestors."

Al is also hosting the next edition of the carnival. The theme is "Arrival in New Lands" dealing with the who, where, and why our ancestors may have left their homelands and settled in new countries. Submissions will be due on June 27th, and he will post the edition on June 30th. You can submit an article here.

Last Call For Submissions!

2010-05-17T03:59:00.000+02:00

This is the last call for submissions for the 29th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy! You have until the end of today to send it in!

The theme is Religion. Articles about religion as part of the life of an ancestor, sources about an ancestor that are connected to their religion, basically anything to do with religion would be accepted.”

Looking For Lamboo Part VI: Local and National History

2010-05-10T12:58:00.001+02:00

Last time I wrote about the interview with my mother about Henriëtte. This time, I'll take a look at sources that do not specifically mention my grandmother but give a picture of the time she lived in.

First, a look at the events in the world and the Netherlands that would’ve affected Henriëtte’s life:

1914-1918 World War 1, Henriëtte was 1-5. This probably didn’t have a large impact on her life.

1929-1939 Great Depression in the Netherlands, Henriëtte was 16-26. This would’ve had a great impact on her life.

1939-1945 World War 2, Henriëtte was 26-32. This had a great impact on her life and we’ll have a closer look at this on a local level.

1956 position of women is improved by the abolishment of the law that said that married women are not capable of making decisions on their own. Henriëtte was 43. This had a direct impact on her life, she could now legally work, take money from a bank account, but large appliances and travel without permission of her husband.

So, the first period in history that had a really big impact on Henriëtte’s life was the Great Depression in the Netherlands. It’s a good period to look into. Hundreds of thousands of people were unemployed in the Netherlands. It was in this period that Henriëtte got married. It must’ve been a trying time, in which the most simple things were luxuries. I’ve found two websites (numbers 3 and 4) with good information and links to further books and websites about this time period in the Netherlands. It’s a good idea to read about this time and get a better idea about

Then, of course, came World War 2. This had a big impact on Henriëtte’s life. A great source for this time period on a local level is the book ‘Achter Verduisterde Ramen – Voorschotense Kronieken 1940-1950’. In this book, 11 different Lamboo’s are mentioned, and although I do not know exactly how they relate to my grandmother, I do know they are related. There is even a picture of one of them. Also, Adolph Knura is named, which I wrote about in this post. A great deal of information can be found in just this one book.

And last, but certainly not least, is the abolishment of the very female unfriendly law in 1956. I’ve found a great, albeit short, article about it (website number 2) and I’m going to see if I can maybe find some more about this.

And then, of course, there are some general topics that can shed some light on the life of Henriëtte. For instance, primary schools and education in the Netherlands in the period 1915-1925, when Henriëtte went to school. Also, some general history on Voorschoten for the period 1913-2004 will give a great picture of the environment she lived in. There are plenty of resources for this in the local library.

Next time, a brief look at the question’s I still have about Henriëtte’s life and how to maybe find some answers to that.

For previous installments of this series, see the Looking For Lamboo page.

Sources
1. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/20e_eeuw
2. http://www.anno.nl/index.cfm/siteid/105D154C-1AA0-1E4C-B367F1F4D569D96D/pageid/28DEFDCD-B489-A9BA-E29D72FB40423714/objecttype/mark.apps.anno.contentobjects.article/objectid/98ECDE1A-C06C-E19D-4A102844B936D6FE/index.cfm
3. http://entoen.nu/crisisjaren
4. http://geschiedenis.vpro.nl/programmas/2899536/afleveringen/28576453/items/28642825/

Looking For Lamboo Part V: Wagging Tongues

2010-05-07T21:08:00.002+02:00

Last time, I wrote about the pictures I have of Henriëtte and the information it gave me. This time, I’ll take a look at the information I have collected about her by interviewing my mother. It was just a short interview and I plan to do a follow-up, but there were certain topics we covered in this first interview.

I asked my mother about the education of Henriëtte, who is her mother. My mother knew that she only went to primary school. After primary school she went to work in the household of doctor de Boer, where she took care of the children, and probably did some cleaning too. As far as my mother knows, there was no money for further education because Henriëtte’s sister got married. She didn’t know which sister it was. My grandmother always regretted not having the opportunity for further education.

Another big topic we talked about was religion. Henriëtte always went to church, either on Saturday evening or on Sunday. She went once a week, and could often ride to church with the neighbors. She kept going to church throughout her life.
She always prayed before dinner, the whole family had to pray. When the children were younger, Henriëtte insisted they all went to church, but by the time they turned into teens, they were allowed to stay at home. All of them did. Her husband Adolph was raised a Catholic, but somewhere along the line he lost his faith and stopped going to church.

For a long time, the Catholic holidays and traditions were a prominent feature in the Knura household. On Fridays Henriëtte always went to the market in town. She would buy fish, as on Fridays it was either fish or eggs for dinner. When my mother was older, this tradition was no longer strictly obeyed and meat started to appear on the Friday menus.

With Christmas, there was a tree. At first there were real candles in the tree, with very pretty clamps. When my mother was still very young, the real candles were replaced by electrical lights. They were lights that resembled candles, from the brand Philips. According to my mother, they had the prettiest Christmas tree in the whole town. Besides a Christmas tree, there was also a nativity scene. At first this was build up according to the Christmas story, later on it was just used as a decoration and in later years it stayed in the closet.

There were some other, small questions I asked, about her membership to social organizations, her music taste and her best friend. Even this one, small interview gave me so much information. It is definitely worth it to do a follow-up interview and perhaps try to interview my aunt, who is almost 20 years older than my mother, and has memories of a time period my mother has no knowledge of.

Next time, I'll take a look at sources that do not specifically mention my grandmother but give a picture of the time she lived in. It can give you the details you need to make the story of an ancestor truly come alive.

For previous installments of this series, see the Looking For Lamboo page.

Carnivals Are In Town!

2010-05-06T17:21:00.002+02:00

I'm a little late with these announcements, but here they are:

The Carnival of Geneology, 93rd edition over at Creative Gene, it's all about How To series!

Next edition will have the theme The Changing Role of Women, deadline for submissions is June 1st.

Also in town:

28th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy at Discovering Latvian Roots.

Next edition will be hosted here, with the theme Religion, with the submission deadline of May 17th! Articles about religion as part of the life of an ancestor, sources about an ancestor that are connected to their religion, basically anything to do with religion would be accepted.”

Dutch Tradition: Liberation Day

2010-05-05T18:44:00.002+02:00

Liberation Day (Dutch: Bevrijdingsdag) is celebrated each year on 5 May, to mark the end of the occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The nation was liberated largely by Canadian troops, with the assistance of the British and American Armies and French airborne troops. On 5 May 1945, the Canadian General Charles Foulkes and the German Commander-in-Chief Johannes Blaskowitz reached an agreement on the capitulation of German forces in the Netherlands in Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen. One day later, the capitulation document was signed in the auditorium of Wageningen University, located next-door to the hotel.

In 1990 the day was declared to be a national holiday, when the liberation would be commemorated and celebrated every year. Every five years, Liberation Day is a special celebration, meaning almost everyone has a free day. On this day, festivals are held in most places in the Netherlands.

Tombstone Tuesday - Remembrance of the Death

2010-05-04T18:38:00.002+02:00

Every year on May 4 Remembrance of the Death (Dutch: Dodenherdenking) is held in the Netherlands. It commemorates all civilians and members of the armed forces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands who have died in wars or peacekeeping missions since the outbreak of World War II.

The main ceremonies are observed in Amsterdam at the national monument on Dam Square. This ceremony is usually attended by members of the cabinet and the royal family, military leaders, representatives of the resistance movement and other social groups. At 8:00 p.m., two minutes of silence are observed throughout the Netherlands. Public transport is stopped, as well as all other traffic. Radio and TV only broadcast the ceremonies from 19.00 until 20.30.

National monument of Dam Square, Amsterdam

There are ceremonies in other cities and places as well. Especially notable are those at the Waalsdorpervlakte near the Hague, where many Dutch resistance fighters were executed during the war, and at the war cemetery Grebbeberg, which are broadcast by the commercial broadcasting companies. In many towns, before or after the two minutes of silence, people gather around a monument, listen to speeches, and lay down flowers to remember the dead.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_the_Dead

Genealogy in the Netherlands: Primary sources after 1811 part III- Burgerlijke Stand (BS) part 1: civil registration

2010-04-30T14:25:00.001+02:00

Last time I discussed Persoonskaarten as a primary source, this time I will be talking about the Burgerlijke Stand (BS), which is the Dutch civil registration. Civil registration in the Netherlands was generally started in 1811, but in the South it was sometimes started as early as 1796. By 1812, every city and town in the Netherlands had started with the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths. These certificates were kept in bound books, one book for every kind of certificate. So there is a book of births, a book of marriages and a book of deaths for every place. Registration occurred in the place where the event took place.

Civil registration of births

The civil registration of births is public after 100 years. So currently, all births before 1910 are public. A birth certificate will give the following data:

Name of the child
Names and residence of the parents
Profession of the father
Date and time of birth
Place of birth
Special notices, like whether the child was born out of wedlock.

Civil registration of marriages

The civil registration of marriages is public after 75 years. So currently, all births before 1935 are public. A marriage certificate will give the following data:

Place and date of the marriage
Names and ages of the bride and groom
Birthplaces of the bride and groom
Profession of the groom, and sometimes also of the bride (be aware, if the certificate notes no profession for the bride, this does not mean she didn’t work at all, she could very well have helped out her family in the family business, for instance)
Names, professions and places of residence for the parents of the bride and groom (often it is also noted if they are deceased at the time of the marriage)
Sometimes mention is made of permission for the marriage, recognition of a child born out of wedlock, and other special events surrounding the marriage
The names, professions and places of residence of the witnesses, sometimes the familial relationship is also noted.

Civil registration of deaths

The civil registration of deaths is public after 50 years. So currently, all deaths before 1960 are public. A death certificate will give the following data:

Name of the deceased
Place, date and time of death
Birthplace and date of the deceased
Profession and place of residence of the deceased
Name of partner, and sometimes of previous partners
Name, profession and places of residence for the parents of the deceased, sometimes it is also noted if the parents are alive or deceased

Finding the certificates

The first thing you need to do is figure out which archive contains the certificates of the town you’re interested in. If you search in Google on ‘archief and name of the town’ it’s easy enough to find. Most archives have a digital search engine that will search all if the civil registry certificates they have. Do always check to see which part of their collection isn’t available digital yet! The Genlias database is also a good idea to check, it contains civil registry certificates from a lot of town in the Netherlands.

When you have found the correct certificate through a digital database, you can usually click on it to get some more information. Sometimes, a digital scan is available. You can see a scan of the original and with that you can easily transcribe all the available data. However, if there is no digital scan, you will either have to order a copy (prizes vary from archive to archive) or go and see the certificate at the archive. If you do not do this, you will miss a lot of information, because only the bare basics of the certificate (name of person(s), name of his/her/their parents and date of event) are in the database. Don’t forget to see the original!

If the town you’re interested in does not have a digital database, you will have to go to the archive to look for the certificate. In this case, you will have to look in the index. The indexes are for every 10 years and give in alphabetical surname order all names of the people who were born, married, died or got divorced in that time period, together with the date the certificate was made. Then you can look for the certificate. Please, do not make the mistake of thinking the date the certificate was made (the date mentioned in the index) is the date of the event!

Some other, important notes

Although I’ve given the time periods after which certificates are considered public, this doesn’t always mean they can be found. There are often delays in handing over certificates to the archives, and especially in smaller towns certificates of multiple years are in the same book, which means the books are transferred every 5 or 10 years, instead of every year. This means that even though I should be able to find a birth certificate made in 1909, there is a good chance it is not at the archive yet. Generally, birth certificates of 1900 and before can be found, marriage certificates of 1925 and before and death certificates of 1950 and before.

There are two other registers that are a part of the Burgerlijke Stand, namely the Huwelijksbijlagen (Marriage Supplements) and the Registers van Naamsaanneming (Registers of Name Adoption). I will talk about them in part 2.

To cite a civil register certificate, use the following: BS [place] Certificate Year [enter year] Number [enter number]

Examples of birth, marriage and death certificates will appear in the series Looking For Lamboo. I will post a notice here when these posts are made.

For other posts in this series, see the How-to Guide to Genealogy in the Netherlands.

The Pilgrim Archives

2010-04-19T12:20:00.002+02:00

Today is Dutch-American friendship day and in honour of that, I'd like to point all of you Americans (and everybody else) who have Pilgrims in their ancestral tree to the Pilgrim Archives.

The Pilgrims were English Protestants, who fled England to escape oppression. They lived and worked in Leiden from 1609 to 1620. From 1620 groups of Pilgrims travelled onwards to North America. The Pilgrim Archives tell the story of the Pilgrims themselves and the 17th century Leiden that was their home.

During their stay in the city the Pilgrims got married, bought houses, got involved in disputes and made wills. In the database on the site you will find the documents the Pilgrims left behind. All records consist of the following data:

Date
Names of all the people mentioned in the document, in the modern English or Dutch
Places and streets mentioned in the document, in the modern English or Dutch
Description of the source (archive, volume)
Number of archive
Number of source
(sometimes) additional number of source
page or number of act.
A short description of the content of the document.
The full transcription of the document itself
A scan of the document

You can search by name, date, place, street and you can do a free search.

Pilgrims who travelled to America are indicated in the text of the description by a letter for the ship they travelled with: M for Mayflower, F for Fortune, ALJ for Anne and Little James, M2 for the second Mayflower.
Those Pilgrims who travelled separately have an approximate year of emigration behind their name.

It's a great resource! Have fun researching!

Looking For Lamboo Part IV: The Stories Pictures Tell

2010-04-12T20:15:00.006+02:00

Yesterday I wrote about all the secondary sources I have for Henriette and what they tell about her life. Today, I'm taking a look at the pictures I have of her and what new information they can give me. Sometimes, a picture is all you have of an event and they can hold surprising amounts of information, especially if you talk to your relatives about it.

The first picture that presents me with new information is the one below, taken around 1920-1921. It's a picture of my grandmother when she's in primary school, so I now know for sure she was in primary school. Primary schools are always local, and she lived in Voorschoten all her life, so she went to the local primary school in Voorschoten. Also, she was Roman Catholic, so she went to the local, Roman Catholic primary school in Voorschoten.

I have a picture of Henriette and Adolph's 35 year marriage party, their 40 year marriage party and, depicted below, their 50 year marriage party. So I know they threw parties!

I know my grandmother liked to do puzzles. This picture, taken somewhere around 1955-1965 shows just how early that hobby had grabbed her!

This picture shows Henriette on a trip with the organization Zonnebloem. It's an organization that battles loneliness in elderly people, among other things, and they organize several (day-)trips a year. My grandmother always went.

And then we come by the MYSTERY PICTURES! The first one shows my grandmother with the group of girls, the second one is an assembly (where I'm sure she's too, I just can't make her out). The organization is girls-only, as far as I can see, and must be Roman Catholic. The pictures where taken between 1925-1935, approximately. I have no idea what organization this is.

So what did we learn? My grandmother attended the local Roman Catholic primary school, threw a party when she was married for 35 years, 40 years and 50 years. (Maybe 25 and 12 1/2 too?) She liked to puzzle early on in life and participated in Zonnebloem trips. Also, she was a member of an organization in her teenage years.

I'm currently making inquiries about what organization is depicted on the mystery pictures and in the summer months I'm going to take a look in the local archive of Voorschoten to see if I can find more information about the primary school she attended.

Next time, we'll take a look at the information I've managed to gather about Henriette in one formal interview with my mother and one small, informal talk with my mother.

Looking For Lamboo Part III: Secondary Sources for Henriette

2010-04-11T16:33:00.001+02:00

Last time I looked at the information I could find on Henriette in the primary documents of Adolph Knura. It was quite a bit of information, but most of it was confirmation of what was in Henriette's primary sources. Almost all of the information was names and dates, but to tell her story I want more information. So, out come the secondary sources.

The first source I have is a notification of the marriage ban of Adolph Knura and Henriette Geertruida Lamboo. It also served as the wedding invitation, because all the information about the date and place of the marriage is on there. The time and place of the marriage is on Wednesday 11 May 1938, in the H. Laurentius Church in Voorschoten at 9.30.

This source also has a little goldnugget of information that is very hard to find elsewhere. It states the current addresses of the couple and the address they will be living in after the wedding! Voorstraat 7 and Burgemeester Vernèdepark 54 are named as the current addresses. Last time, I showed you that one of the addresses of Adolph Knura mentioned on his persoonskaart is Voorstraat 7, which means that Burgemeester Vernèdepark 54 is Henriette's address. The address the married couple moved into is Burgemeester Vernèdepark 14, which is corroborated by Adolph's persoonskaart.

The next document I have that mentions Henriette is Adolph Knura's German passport. It was issued on 15 October 1952 and Henriette is recorded in there as his wife, with picture and everything. Besides giving her birthdate, birthplace and place of residence, it also gives a description of her. She's described as 159 centimeters in lenght, oval shaped face and green eyes. The four children that were born at the time the passport was issued are also noted in there with their names and birthdates.

I also have a Dutch passport for Henriette herself, but this one was issued on 14 December 1987. It once again gives us a birthdate and place and the current place of residence. Here too, a description is given, but very brief. 151 centimeters tall and green eyes. It also contains a picture and signature of Henrietter.

This passport also shows a trip she made to Australia, almost two years after her husband died. She arrived on 10 December 1991 in Australia and left 23 January 1992. She visited her eldest daughter, who lives in Australia, during this trip.

I also have a tourist card for Henriette in my possesion. This tourist card was issued on 4 June 1960 and was a short-term 'passport' that could be used for a trip within several European Countries, among which was Germany. The tourist card was most likely requested by Henriette for a trip to Adolph Knura's family in Bottrop.

Th card itself doesn't give any new information, once again containing a birthdate, birthplace and current place of residence. It does, however, contain a picture.

The last paper source I have that mentions Henriette is one of Adolph Knura's In Memoriams. In it, it says that Adolph and his wife (Henriette) manage the SVLV clubhouse for years. SVLV is a local soccer club. This was in the years 1945-1965, give or take a few years.

This time we learned quite a lot. We got some more details about Adolph and Henriette's marriage, we got information about two addresses where Henriette lived, we got information about two trips she took and we got a description! Also, she helped her husband for years with managing the clubhouse of the local soccer club.

Next time: pictures as secondary sources.

Sources:
Ondertrouw aankondiging van A. Knura en H.G. Lamboo, 21 April 1938, Voorschoten, Zuid-Holland, Familiearchief Mulder, Voorschoten.
"Paspoort Adolph Knura" 15 oktober 1952, Duitse Ambassade, Den Haag, Familiearchief Mulder, Voorschoten.
"Paspoort Henriette Geertruida Lamboo" Afgegeven op 14 December 1987, Familiearchief Mulder, Voorschoten.
"Toeristenkaart van Henriette Geertruida Lamboo" Afgegeven op 4 June 1960, Familiearchief Mulder, Voorschoten.
"In Memoriam voor Adolph Knura" undated clipping, February 1990, from unidentified newspaper; Familiearchief Mulder; privately held 2010 by J. Mulder, [address for private use], Voorschoten.

Reconstruction of the Knura Family's Migration

2010-04-06T17:26:00.003+02:00

My grandfather Adolph Knura was not the first of his family to come to Voorschoten and he was also not the last. Throughout the first half of the 20th century his siblings came and went between Voorschoten (and surrounding places) and Bottrop. Only my grandfather and his elder sister Anna stayed in Voorschoten. In an effort to document their trips back and forth over the border, I have searched the digitalized newspaper archive of the Regional Archive Leiden. Although this has given me a lot of information, it is by no means complete, nor is it always accurate. However, it is likely going to be all that I have, as I can’t think of another source at the moment. So, for better or worse, I present to you: the migration of the Knura siblings.

Sometime before August 1924: Anna Knura arrives in Leiden from Germany

August 1924: Anna Knura moves from Leiden to Kasteel Oud Wassenaar (Castle Old Wassenaar) in Wassenaar

Sometime before January 1925: Maria Knura arrives in Leiden from Germany (possibly together with her sister Anna?)

January 1925: Maria Knura moves from Leiden to Grutonstrasse 5, Bottrop, Germany

1928: Anna Knura marries L.J. van Aken and moves to Donklaan 30, Voorschoten

February/March 1932: Adolph Knura moves from Germany to Donklaan 30, Voorschoten

Sometime before 1933: E. Knura moves from Germany to Voorschoten

June 1933: E. Knura (male) moves from Voorschoten to Bottrop, Germany

August 1933: E. Knura (male) moves from Bottrop Germany to Donklaan 30, Voorschoten

Sometime between August 1933 and July 1936: E. Knura moves from Voorschoten to Germany

May 1934: Karl Knura moves from Germany to Voorschoten

June 1935: Karl Knura moves from Voorschoten to Germany

July 1936: E. Knura (male) moves from Germany to Donklaan 12, Voorschoten

January 1937: E. Knura (male) moves from Voorschoten to Bottrop, Germany

I have no records of any Knura’s migrating after 1937.

Sources:

"Opgave van personen die uit Leiden zijn vertrokken," Leidsch Dagblad, 13 August 1924, Vertrokken Mej. A. Knura, Wassenaar, Kasteel Oud Wassenaar; on-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 2/8.

"Lijst vestiging en vertrek," Nieuwe Leidsche Courant, 28 January 1925, Vertrokken: Mej. M. Knura, Bottrop (D), Grutonstrasse 5; On-line scan, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 8/8. From context: she left Leiden.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 1 March 1932, Gevestigd: A. Knura, Donklaan 30, van Duitsland; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 6/12.

"Loop de bevolking - Voorschoten," Nieuwe Leidsche Courant, 21 June 1933, Vertrokken: E. Knura n Bottrop (Dld.); On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 6/8.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 19 June 1933, Vertrokken: E. Knura naar Bottrop (Dld.); On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 11/14.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 5 August 1933, Gevestigd: E. Knura, Donklaan 30, van Bottrop (Dld); On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 7/14.

"Voorschoten - Ingekomen," Leidsche Courant, 4 August 1933, Ingekomen: E. Knura, Donklaan 30, van Bottrop, (Dld.); On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 7/10.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 8 July 1936, Gevestigd: E. Knura, Donklaan 12; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 7/12.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 4 January 1937, Vertrokken: E. Knura naar Bottrop, Dld.; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 8/14.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Nieuwe Leidsche Courant, 28 May 1934, Ingekomen: Karl Knura van Duitsland; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 6/8.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 19 May 1934, Ingekomen: Karl Knura van Duitsland; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 6/20.

"Loop der bevolking - Voorschoten," Leidsch Dagblad, 22 June 1934, Vertrokken: K. Knura naar Duitsland; On-line scans, Digitaal Krantenarchief Regionaal Archief Leiden (http://leiden.courant.nu/ : accessed 4 April 2010); page 7/16.

Looking For Lamboo Part II: Adolph Knura

2010-04-05T14:45:00.003+02:00

Last time I looked at the primary source for Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo. This time, I’m going to take a look at the primary sources of her husband, Adolph Knura. Considering the fact that married partners spend a great part of their lives together, it’s good practice to look into sources that are primarily about the partner of your research subject for information about your research subject.

As with Henriëtte, civil registration records for Adolph Knura are not public yet. However, his persoonskaart is. Below in the pictures you can see the front and the back of the card. I blacked out all info on his living children. Translation follows below the pictures. My own comments are in the brackets.

Front of the card:
Box 1 gaVR [civil archive Voorschoten] 27 Apr 59 [1959] AA [Don’t know the meaning of AA, but 27 April 1959 is the date the civil records were compared to the data on the card, approximately a year after Adolph got the Dutch nationality]

Box 2 Women [This is clearly a mistake, it should have read Husband or at the very least Male]

Box 3a Knura
Box 3b Adolph

Box 4 Born on 1 Juli 1914, city Bottrop, country Germany

Box 5 Nationality Vr [crossed out, possibly stands for stranger/foreigner which he was until 1958] Ned [short for The Netherlands] see box 35

Box 7 Occupation: painter (o) [The o means he was an employee]

Box 8 Son of: Josef – and Zbieszczyk, Sophia

Box 9 and 10 Married with: Lamboo, Henriëtte Geertruida

Box 11 and 12 Born on 15 Dec 13 [1913] in Zoeterwoude [Here we have confirmation on Henriëtte’s birth date and place]

Box 13 Married on 11 May 38 [1938] in Voorschoten [Confirmation of their marriage date]

Box 21 and 22 [These contain a list of addresses Adolph lived and the dates the change of addresses were reported]
BOTTROP (Dld) [Germany]
VOORSCHOTEN
25 Feb 32 [1932] Voorstraat 7 [Voorschoten]
12 May 38 [1938] Burg Vernèdepark 14 [Voorschoten] [This is the day after Henriëtte and Adolph were married, so it is very likely this is the house they moved to]
20 Dec 40 [1940] Burg Vernèdepark 54 [Voorschoten]
24 Apr 41 [1941] Badhuisstraat 18 [Voorschoten]
13 Sep 45 [1945] [Address blacked out for privacy reasons, address still in Voorschoten] [I know for a fact that Henriëtte and Adolph lived at this address until 1990, Adolph died before the move was comlete]

Box on the lower right side:
Died in Leiden on 30 Jan 1990

Back of the card:
Box 27-32 [These boxes give information on all of Adolph’s children. All of his children come from his marriage with Henriëtte and this information matches what is on Henriëtte’s persoonslijst, but this card provides a little more information. I blacked out the data of the living children, but once again left Bertje’s information available]

O [stands for deceased] 11 Sep 61 [1961] in Leiden, Lambertus Johannes Adolphus, Born 19 Jun 55 [1955] in Voorschoten

Box 35 Naturalized by law v 18 Dec 57 [1957], Stb 538, valid from 1 Jan 58 [1958]; change added on 16 Jan 58 [1958]
[Here we have information on Adolph’s naturalization, which was quite late. This had some effect on his children, but not on Henriëtte, she was and remained throughout her life a Dutch citizen.]

So what information about Henriëtte did we get by looking at Adolph Knura’s primary records? Well, first of all it gave us confirmation on Henriëtte’s date and place of birth and the date and place of her marriage. It also gave us a list of addresses where she could’ve lived during her life, from her marriage onward. However, here it is very important to note that a) this information is not flawless (as shown by the epithet of woman used for my grandfather!), b) the addresses listed are addresses for Adolph Knura and therefore do not necessarily mean the rest of the family lived there too and c) a lot of these address changes were during the war years and considering my grandfather was a German and therefore likely to be called to serve in the military (and eventually was), it is plausible that the address changes were just him moving around or him saying he was moving around. The records are suspicious and need further looking into. So, while the addresses are a nice place to start, they need to be corroborated by other sources, both for Adolph as for Henriëtte.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the secondary sources I have for Henriëtte, collected from closets of various family members. Perhaps we’ll find some new information and we might even corroborate some of the information we found in the primary sources.

Sources
Personal knowledge J. Mulder, granddaughter of Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo
Persoonskaart: CBG, persoonskaart Adolph Knura (1914-1990).

Genealogy in the Netherlands: Primary sources after 1811 part II – Persoonskaarten

2010-04-04T13:35:00.002+02:00

Last time I discussed Persoonslijsten as a primary source. This time I will be talking about its predecessor Persoonskaarten.

Persoonskaarten were introduced in 1938 and the introduction was complete in 1940. These cards hold a lot of primary information and sometimes some supplemental information. Persoonskaarten are available for everyone who was living in the Netherlands in the period 1938-1940 (some towns were faster with switching systems than others) and died before 1 October 1994. The card can be requested in writing by the Central Bureau for Genealogy in The Hague. (See www.cbg.nl for more information)

If there is a Persoonskaart of the person you’re interested in, you get a copy of the card. There are several boxes on the card, this is what you can find there:

On the front:

Box 1: Date the name and birth date and place were compared with the birth certificate of civil registry. In some cases, a person outside the Netherlands born, that comparison was not possible.

Box 2. Relation to the head of the household, such as husband, wife, father and mother.

Box 3. Surname (box 3a) and first names (box 3b).

Box 4. Date of birth and town where the birth took place.

Box 5. Nationality.

Box 7. Occupation and whether one job as head (h) or subordinate (o) was employed. Although changes in occupation had to be reported, this often didn’t happen so these data are often outdated.

Box 8. The names, birth places and dates of the parents. When in 1938/1939 the cards were made, it was not always possible to find information on the parents, especially the elderly, So this information is sometimes missing.

Boxes 9 and 10. Surname(s) and first name(s) of spouse(s.

Boxes 11 and 12. Birthdate(s) and place(s) of spouse(s).

Box 13. Date and place of marriage.

Blocks 14, 15 and 16. Date and place where the marriage was dissolved by death of partner (O) or divorce (S).

Box 22. Data on consecutive home addresses of person. The CBG is not allowed to provide the addresses of persons who died less than 20 years ago, in order to protect the privacy of the families, who often lived or still live at the same addresses.

The death date and place of the person which is noted on the back of the card is also printed on the front of the card.

The back of the card contains personal data mainly on the children. Usually children only appear on the card of the father. From the back you only get one copy if children are indeed mentioned. You will get the data:

Box 27. The date and manner in which the child left the family of the person on the other side. The way is indicated by a letter: A for departure (administratively removed), O for death, H for marriage.

Boxes 28 and 29. Surname and first names of the children.

Boxes 30 and 31. Birthplace and dates of the children.

Box 32. The ratio of children to the household, z for son, d for daughter, sd for stepdaughter and sz for stepson.

By the introduction of the card in 1938/1939 previous marriages of married persons weren’t always recorded and the children who were not living at home anymore were also often not recorded. Children did of course get their own individual card. This does not apply to children who were already deceased. On the back there are also sometimes other notations made, like naturalizations, but these are rare.

Some cards of deceased persons from the war years 1940-1945 have been lost during the war.

If you want to properly source a Persoonskaart, use this format: Persoonskaart: CBG, persoonskaart [first names and surname] ([year of birth]-[year of death]).
For an example of a persoonskaart and what can be gleaned from it, see Looking for Lamboo part II, in which I take a look at Adolph Knura’s persoonskaart to get information on Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo.

For other posts in this series, see the How-to Guide to Genealogy in the Netherlands.

Ancestor Approved Award

2010-04-03T22:53:00.004+02:00

I’ve been honoured with the Ancestor Approved Award by Miriam from Ancestories: The Stories of My Ancestors, and by Dorene from Graveyard Rabbit of Sandusky Bay, and also by Cheryl from Heritage Happens.

The Ancestor Approved Award asks that the recipient list ten things you have learned about any of your ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened you and pass the award along to ten other bloggers who you feel are doing their ancestors proud.

My ancestors have surprised me many times, but I’ll share some of the biggest surprises:

1. I discovered that my grandfather Adolph Knura was imprisoned by the Dutch government after World War II on suspected treason. Neither I nor my mother (his daughter) knew about this. I briefly blogged about it here, but this is definitely a surprise that I need to look into some more.

2. I always knew my great-grandfather Salomon Mulder had been a POW in World War II, but to my great surprise, he had been imprisoned in a prison camp in Singapore. I never would’ve looked for him there, if I hadn’t found the information in his military record, which I recently acquired and blogged about here.

3. Another surprise came out of Salomon Mulder’s military record. It was stated he was Roman-Catholic, which came as a big surprise because his son (my grandfather), Klaas Mulder, was definitely Nederlands-Hervormd. I did some checking with my grandmother, and she told me my grandfather converted to Nederlands-Hervormd during his stay in the Dutch East Indies. Another thing learned.

4. A big surprise came from Anna Knura, the sister of my grandfather Adolph Knura. I’d always believed that the Van Aken family was connected to my family by marriage with a Lamboo. However, it was Anna Knura who married a Van Aken and in fact, she came here from Germany almost ten years before my grandfather did! Now that came as a big surprise! Read about that particular discovery here.

5. My recent visit to the CBG, blogged about here, brought a great surprise. I knew that there was a Wesselo Family Archive there, but I never expected it to be six boxes full of pictures, letters and documents of almost all of the Wesselo’s that are my direct ancestors and their brothers and sisters. I was literally blown away.

Of course, except for surprises, there are plenty of ancestors who humble me with their actions. Here are a few examples:

6. My grandfather Adolph Knura spend most of his life doing volunteer work with the local soccer clubs. I blogged about that in this post. Whenever I read and hear how much he has done in his life, I am humbled. Because, really, next to that, I’m kinda lazy looking…

7. I am humbled by the love and generosity of my parents. They set an example I might never be able to meet, yet still strive for.

There are many ancestors who have stories that enlighten me, but some are even more remarkable than others. Funnily enough, they’re all woman!

8. My mother, she sets a great example of how a mother should be. I want to be her when I grow up! No really, I am not kidding. I know most people have some things they would do different from their parents when they have their own children. But when I look at my mother, I really and truly don’t want to do anything different.

9. My great-grandmother Adriana Versloot, whom I briefly blogged about here, is still shrouded in mystery. Still, with every bit of the puzzle I collect, my admiration for her grows. Married to a marine who doesn’t seem to live in the same place for more than a couple of years, having three children, being a POW in World War II and eventually losing your life while imprisoned; it all paints the story of a hard life. But she left behind a strong and loving impression on my grandfather and I know she helped shape the man he became. Because of that, she is an example for me.

10. My grandmother Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo was born in a time period where she didn’t get all the chances women today have. Still, she lived her life to the fullest, always learning, always giving, always there. I did a brief biography of her life in this blogpost. She is and will always be a great inspiration to me.

Now I know you are supposed to pass the award on to 10 bloggers, but since there is no way I can choose, I pass this on to every blogger who reads this post who hasn't received this award yet!

Visit to the CBG

2010-04-03T11:59:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I spend my very first day at an archive, looking at actual sources instead of copies and digital images. The archive that I visited was the Central Bureau for Genealogy (Centraal Bureau voor Genealogy, CBG), which is the Dutch information and documentation centre for genealogy, family history and related sciences. It's not a governmental archive, but a private one, and as I am a member of the CBG, I have free access to the studyroom.

I must say, I spend the entire day there and it was still too short! Especially considering the fact that there are six (!) boxes of the family archive Wesselo, which contains letters, documents and pictures of almost all of my Wesselo ancesters. But also from other branches I am investigating there is a lot of material. I didn't even have the time to properly look at it all.

There were two highlights of this visit. The first one is that I might've found a related Knura, and if that is the case, than I have a clue as to where Bergmann Josef Knura was born! I can't be certain yet, but it's a start and far more than I expected to find.

The second was a handwritten letter by Johanna Wilhelmina Boezel to her two sons Hendrik Wesselo and Jan Jerphaas Wesselo. Hendrik Wesselo is my great-great-grandfather. There was also some accompanying information written out by a Wesselo, that gave a bit of background information about some points in the letter.

Of course there were many more gems in the Wesselo family archive, not to mention some great little tidbits on other lines. It'll take at least a couple of more visits to get everything written down, but that's half the fun!

The Effects of War

2010-03-29T19:33:00.002+02:00

We live in times of peace. Sure, there are wars today and yes, many of the armed forces of Western countries, including the Netherlands, are fighting those wars. But these wars are fought overseas, far away, in countries not our own. We, civilians, are safe in our own country, our own houses, our own beds, far away from the devastation of war. How different this was for our ancestors. Many of them lived through times of war. Wars fought in their own country, their own towns, their own backyards.

We, as genealogists, often find records of those times. Records for our ancestors that served in the military, but also plenty of records of civilians in war times. And even if there are no records that specifically mention our ancestors, there are a lot of records and data about the wars, on a national and local level. It paints a vivid enough picture of those times and we can imagine our ancestors in that context. However, there is one important thing we often overlook when we look at wars. Maybe it’s because we have never truly known war, but it’s so easy to look at the dates in a history book and say ‘that’s when the war ended’. How wrong we often are!

The dates in history books tell when the battles ended, when peace was signed, but never is it the date the war ended. Wars can be compared to earthquakes. First there’s a big one, the war itself. Then, when that is over, there is at least one, but often several aftershocks. People’s lives have been ruined and effects of the war can be felt for years afterwards. And just because the big fight is over, doesn’t mean that all conflict magically disappears.

I was vividly reminded of this fact just last week. I’d long coveted the book ‘Achter verduisterde ramen – Voorschotense kronieken 1940-1950’, which is a book about the Second World War and the years after in Voorschoten, the place where my grandparents (all of them) lived during the war. It came out in 2009 and last week I finally bought it. I had expected to find several of my ancestors in it, like L.J. van Aken, a resistance man who barely survived an assassination attack, and B.C. Bolle, who held several public posts just after the war. I was not surprised to find a long list of Lamboo’s, all related in some way or another to me, as they are a big family and they’ve always been very active in the community. It did come as somewhat as a surprise though, to find my grandfather Adolph Knura mentioned.

Adolph Knura was German and he came to the Netherlands in 1932. His sister, Anna Knura, was married to L.J. van Aken and he came to live with her and work for L.J. van Aken’s painting company. He met my grandmother Henriette Geertruida Lamboo and got married. By the time the war broke out, they had two children. But however much my grandfather had integrated into Dutch society, he was still legally a German citizen. And so it came to pass that my grandfather was called to serve in the German army. He didn’t want to, but he still had parents and siblings in Germany and if he didn’t comply, they would feel the wrath of the Nazi’s. After the war, he returned home. All of this was known to me, and I expected there to maybe be a mention of this in the book.

Color me surprised when I opened the page his name was listed on according to the index to read the title ‘Landsverraderlijke personen’ or translated: ‘traitors’. According to the book, my grandfather was arrested after his return from Germany and spend a year in a prison camp before he was released, having been cleared of charges of being a traitor. The source for this was an interview with A.J. Lamboo, held in 2005. This information came as a complete surprise to both me and my mother. We had never heard of this before.

I need to look further into this, of course, see if I can find any paper sources for this, and maybe ask my aunt, who was around 6 or 7 at that time, if she remembers anything of it. Still, whether this is in fact true or not, and I’m inclined to say it’s true, it brings home the fact that after a war is fought, the war isn’t over yet. It wasn’t for my grandfather, nor for any of the other people arrested on charges of being a traitor (true or false). It wasn’t over for any of their families either. For years after the war, the effects were felt. And it’s important to realize that, spoiled as we are with peace. It will not only lead us to unexplored sources, like in my case, it will also help us realize just how good we have it.

Fearless Females - Promt #26

2010-03-26T10:55:00.000+01:00

What education did your mother receive? Your grandmothers? Great-grandmothers? Note any advanced degrees or special achievements.

My grandmother Henriette Geertruida Lamboo only went to primary school. According to what my mother told me, she then went to work as a housekeeper with doctor Boer, where she also took care of his children. My mother recalled a family story that there wasn't any money to let my grandmother study any further because her sister got married.

What I know for sure is that my grandmother was a bright woman and she keenly felt the loss of not having had the opportunity to continue learning.

Fearless Females - Promt #25

2010-03-25T22:42:00.000+01:00

Tell how a female ancestor interacted with her children. Was she loving or supportive? A disciplinarian? A bit of both?

I asked my mother about what kind of mother my grandmother was. My mother told me that she was a different mother to her than to the other children. There was quite a bit of a difference in age between my mother and the rest of my grandmother's children. My mother was not only the youngest, but by the time she was born, my two aunts were almost adults and after them there were four boys. My mother was allowed more than her brothers, she was a bit spoiled in comparison.

My mother was, and is, a great mother. She's loving and supportive, and I can talk to her about absolutely anything. I blessed to have her.

Bribed By Dancing

2010-03-23T10:16:00.000+01:00

The cashier looked at the two teenagers in horror. She’d just scanned two full shopping carts of products and the total amount on the register was almost 100 gulden. And apparently, the two girls that were doing the shopping were planning to pay in coins. Small change, collected in two large, heavy bags. The people in the line behind the teens were growing restless, but there was nothing they, or she, could do to speed things up. With a big sigh, the cashier bowed to the inevitable and started counting the coins.

Perhaps you are wondering what the above scene has to do with dancing, since that is the topic of this edition of the COG. Perhaps it will make more sense if you know that one of the teenagers was me, roughly ten years ago, and the reason for the whole scene was dancing. You see, I love dancing, I really do, but I rarely get a chance to do so. So when in my second year of high school my home room teacher asked for two volunteers to arrange a dance feast, guess who signed up with her best friend? Yes, that would be me.

Luckily, there really wasn’t much work involved. Our school had several great amenities that most schools don’t. We had our own gym, our own theater with seating for about 60 people, and our very own disco. The disco was generally used as an overflow-cafeteria. There were several vending machines there, a bar, and two niches with inbuilt seating and a table. There were also several loose bar-like tables. The entire thing was done in red and black. So, location wasn’t a problem.

Music and lights weren’t a problem either; there was a special commission that took care of that. So the only thing we really had to do was buy snacks and drinks. And boy, did we make a nuisance of ourselves while doing that. Still, until this day, I honestly claim that it was not our fault!

In order to pay for the drinks and snacks, tickets were sold to all those who wanted to come. Our class was organizing it together with another class, and between the two classes there were about 50 people coming. A ticket cost something around 3 gulden, I believe, and most paid in small coins. Think 25 cent coins, 10 cent coins, 5 cent coins, and occasionally 1 gulden coins. So, when my friend J. and I went to the supermarket the day before the feast, we had two bags full of coins.

Once we were at the local supermarket, the snacks were taken care of pretty quickly and actually filled an entire cart. We weren’t too worried we’d gotten too much, after all, 50 hungry teenagers can eat through much more than what we had gathered. It was mainly chips anyway, and the bags contain much less than the size they actually are. However, when we had to decide on the soda, we came upon a problem. Neither one of us had ever shopped for so much people and we were uncertain how many bottles we should get. We decided that it was better to have too much to drink than not enough, but that left the problem of maybe being stuck with a dozen or more unopened bottles.

This was about the time that I came up with a brilliant plan that might’ve aggravated the manager of the store. I decided that we should ask the manager if we could return any unopened bottles, so I had someone fetch him. To say he was not happy that two teenage girls were trying to get him to agree to their unconventional plan is probably the understatement of the decade. Eventually though, he agreed. So, J and I filled a second cart with soda and some fruit juice and then made our way to the check-out.

The horror scene described at the beginning of this post became reality there. I have never seen a cashier so horrified in my life and the people behind us in line weren’t exactly happy either. Still, J. and I had great fun!

The party turned out great, with lots of dancing. We did indeed have about 5 unopened bottles of soda left, which were returned the next day. This whole episode would never have come about if I hadn’t been promised dancing. The worst part? I was taken in by the same promise not two years later! Also, the left-over money from this little shopping trip precipitated an event that nearly destroyed my friendship with J. But, that are stories for another time….

Fearless Females - Promt #21

2010-03-21T10:39:00.000+01:00

Describe a tender moment one of your female ancestors shared with you or another family member.

My mother described a tender moment she had with my father and me. Although, if me is the right word in this case, I'm not sure, since it was about 10 weeks after my conception. It was the first time my parents saw and heard my heartbeat. In the words of my mother, it was 'indescribable'.

History of a Village on the Hills

2010-03-13T23:00:00.003+01:00

My grandfather Adolph Knura was born in Bottrop, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Nordrhein-Westfalen borders the Netherlands and Bottrop is right in the middle of the highly industrial Rurh-area. My grandfather was born in 1914 and left Bottrop in 1932, and although he returned there numerous times to visit his family, he never lived there again.

Although my grandfather’s stay in Bottrop was short, the history of Bottrop, which means ‘Village on the Hills’, is everything but short. Bottrop was first mentioned, as Borgthorpe, in 1092 as being part of the assets of a monastery. In 1423 Bottrop received the right to hold markets, a very valuable right at the time. The first time Bottrop shows up on a map is in 1573, the name in use by then is Bortdorpe. The current name of Bottrop is seen on documents for the first time in 1630.

In 1856 a mine is opened in nearby Essen, which is the start of the industrial era in Bottrop. Mining would continue to play an important part of life in Bottrop until well into the 20th century. I know for a fact that Adolph Knura’s father, Bergmann Josef Knura, was a miner. Because of work opportunities opening up, there is an immigration wave in 1880 to Bottrop. The industrial era also shows up in advances like electric lights, first seen in Bottrop in 1896, and a tram that runs from the Horsemarket to Essen, which rides for the first time in 1899.

On 1 July 1914, on the dawn of World War I, my grandfather Adolph Knura is born. Four years later, in 1918, the war is over. Bottrop as a community mourns the loss of 1678 soldiers who lost their lives in this war. A scant year later in 1919, Bottrop finally gets city rights, which they had been trying to get since 1905.

In 1923 the city is occupied by Belgian and French troop for two years. As of yet, I have been unable to find out exactly why this was and if it was just Bottrop that was affected or if the surrounding towns, or even a larger area, was also occupied.

In 1930 one of the mines in Bottrop closes. Two years later, my grandfather Adolph Knura leaves Bottrop, where he leaves his parents and several siblings. Considering that a year later, in 1933, the Nazi’s hoist the swastika flag at city hall as their first public appearance in Bottrop, he might have gotten away from there just in time. Local parties are put aside, as is the major.

In 1940, World War II starts showing its effects on Bottrop. The newspaper is shut down and the bronze clocks of the churches in Bottrop are melted down for the war effort. In 1942 a wing of the Maria Hospital is hit by a landmine. The hospital is severely damaged. The Althoff Mall is destroyed by a bomb in March of 1943. Aerial attacks do heavy damage in Bottrop in 1944. Especially the neighborhood Ruhröl is heavily hit, about seventy percent of the residential buildings there are destroyed. On 30 March 1945 Americans occupy Bottrop. I don’t know exactly when they leave, but considering that there are elections in 1946, I expect the Americans are gone by then.

In the years after the war, rebuilding is a big theme. The Althoff Mall that was completely destroyed reopens in 1951. And in 1954 the first carnival parade is held since the war. In that same year, the last of the destroyed buildings is completely broken down.

Economically, Bottrop is very dependent on the coal mines in the years after the war. In 1955, half of the working people in Bottrop make their livelihoods directly or indirectly from the mines. It’s also in 1955 that the first bus starts riding in Bottrop, it’s the beginning of the end for the tram lines. In 1958 a new coal mine is opened nearby.

Bottrop and the neighboring Kirchhellen form the new city Bottrop in 1976. In December of that same year, the last tram in Bottrop stops it’s service. In 1981 the largest coal processing plant of Europe is opened in Bottrop. In 1987 Pope John Paul II visits Bottrop. In 1996 the biggest sportstadion of Bottrop, the Dieter-Renz- Halle, burns down to the ground.

In the first decade of this century, Bottrop has started large renovations to modernize the city. Neither my grandfather, nor any of his siblings, as far as I know, were alive to see this. For them, Bottrop would always be the city that lived of the mines.

Sources:

http://krix-s.de/bottrop_geschichte.htm
German wikipedia page about Bottrop

This post was written for the 27th edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy.

Salomon Mulder - Marine

2010-03-12T20:38:00.000+01:00

I had found out on-line a while back that there might be some information about my great-grandfather Salomon Mulder at the National Institute for Military History, of course concentrating on his career as a Marine. Considering that he was a professional all of his life and he was a POW in WWII, I had hoped there might be some information there. There were, however, two problems. The first was that although I was sure there was information there, it was in the form of a personal record, which could contain anything from a small piece of paper with just his name and rank, or his entire service record. I was of course hoping for the last to be the case, but there was no way to tell until I actually saw the record.

And that was where the second problem came in. This archive is a military archive, housed on a military base. Because of this, it has very limited opening hours, no weekend days where you can go there, and if I understood correctly from their site, you even had to make an appointment before you came. This all combined with the fact that I have normal working hours made it so that it would be August before I could get there in person and look at the record. And I, being the impatient being that I am, didn’t want to wait that long!

So, I send them an e-mail, detailing where the record was and if it was possible to get a copy of whatever was in it. I honestly didn’t expect much, most archives have too much work to bother with such a request. However, to my great surprise, not even a week later I got a thick, fat envelop from the NIMH. And look, there it was, copies of everything in the file, no costs attached!

And what was in the file? Two loose cards of service from Salomon and his entire (yes, ENTIRE!) service book, detailing everything from postings, to ranks, to diploma’s, to his pension, and even his two marriages, including his children and stepchildren, and sometimes even addresses. I am so happy with this. It will take careful study, as the handwriting is tiny, sometimes untidy and hard to read. But oh, will it be worth it! It’s a virtual treasure trove of information, and one I never expected. I’m really, really happy with this, as it is the very first record I have found for my great-grandfather.

Fearless Females - Promt #4

2010-03-04T21:41:00.002+01:00

Do you have marriage records for your grandparents or great-grandparents? Write a post about where they were married and when. Any family stories about the wedding day? Post a photo too if you have one.

The date was 20 December 1979. In Voorschoten, my mother woke up to a house full of nervous energy. The only one not nervous was my mother herself. She got herself ready and by the time her soon to be father-in-law arrived to take her to the hairdresser, she was ready to go. With her hat, needed to get her hairdo to fit perfectly with her outfit, she was driven to the hairdresser at the Johan van Meerplantsoen. She passed the house of her fiancée on the way, which she found kind of exciting.

After getting her hair done, she went back home. It was incredibly busy, because besides her parents, one of her brothers, T., and his family were staying at the house too. Everybody is excited and present, except her two sisters. Her eldest sister is in Australia, where she lives, she’d been to the engagement party but couldn’t make it to the wedding. Her other sister is at the time still persona non-grata at home, so she wasn’t there either. Her sister-in-law S. helped her with her dress and make-up, while her mother fluttered around her.

Ten minutes before the wedding party arrived at the house to pick up the bride and her family, there was a panic. It became apparent that the pants of my mother’s youngest brother, R., hadn’t been shortened yet. In the few minutes remaining until they had to leave, S. did a rush job of sewing the hem by hand. It was done on time.

My mother looked out the window and saw a dark red Rolls-Royce driving up and she knew her fiancée was in it. At the time, they were replacing the brick road in front of the house with an asphalt road and my mother’s father had gone to the workers the day before and told them his daughter was getting married the next day. He’d asked if they could clean the road up a bit so the wedding party wouldn’t have to go trudging through the mud. They’d been very kind and the road in front of the house was pretty clean. Her father opened the door, while my mother was still in her parent’s bedroom, which had been transformed into a dressing room for that day. And my father came upstairs and peeked around the corner of the door, carrying her bride bouquet. My mother thought he looked cool. Together they went downstairs into the waiting cars, with all the neighbors watching.

They drove to the town-hall and on the way there they heard that close to the town-hall there’d been a car accident and a child had been hit. My mother was startled, because she knew a lot of children were going to be there, because both she and my father were active with the youth division of the soccer club. They were lucky, nobody they knew was involved in the accident. They arrived at the town-hall, where even more family and friends were waiting. After they went inside, there was a bit of a consternation. My father was supposed to give the rings to somebody to hold on to, but there was nobody there to take them. The official was unpleasant, he was telling them to hurry it up. All my mother was thinking was ‘as long as I get my ring back when it’s time’. The situation worked itself out, and before my mother knew it, she was married. The official told nice story, but she honestly can’t remember what it was about anymore, just that it was nice. She had to sign and afterwards, when she sat down, she slipped and almost landed on the floor. Because she was still underage, her parents had to sign too, and she needed a witness, which was her brother R. To keep things equal, my father’s parents also signed, and his younger brother H. signed as his witness. The bride and groom then received all the congratulations. My mother hoped nobody cried, because if someone started crying she’d start too, and she didn’t want to cry. Whether she actually cried or not, she doesn’t remember.

Afterwards, they went to the Burgemeester Vernedepark to take the wedding pictures. When first mentioning the park as a location to the photographer, he’d been surprised, he hadn’t even known Voorschoten had a park. They were very lucky. It had been raining all morning, but by the time the wedding party left my mother’s home, the sun was shining.

After the pictures, my parents drove to restaurant Allemansgeest in Voorschoten. My mother had always thought it to be a nice, romantic location. When her father-in-law had asked her where she wanted to hold the wedding reception and dinner, which he would pay for, she’d immediately thought of Allemansgeest. However, because it was fairly expensive, she was hesitant to mention it. She talked about it with her mother-in-law. When she asked my mother where my mother wanted to have the reception and dinner, my mother admitted she liked Allemansgeest. My mother-in-law responded by saying that that was what she’d had in mind too, because she thought it to be such a beautiful location, so that’s what they would do. She then went to her husband and said: “we want to have the wedding at Allemansgeest”.

When my parents entered the restaurant, everybody who was there, which was my mother’s family, my father’s family, her godmother Ali de Jong, and her father’s youngest brother Paul Knura and his wife Else, stood up and sang a special song. Some more wedding pictures were taken there, one besides the Christmas tree at the request of my mother. She wanted one because she had a picture of her engagement also besides the Christmas tree. The party had coffee and cake and talked for a while. Then the room was prepared for the reception. My mother remembers little of the actual reception, only that is was very, very busy and she got lots of presents. The only present that she recalls is a Japanese aralia. She remembers it so well because it barely fit the car when they left and in the years after that it grew so big it didn’t fit in the living room anymore. Eventually, she gave it away the her neighbor, who’d always said she liked the plant so much.

After the reception, the wedding party had dinner in the round room of Allemansgeest. It was in this same room the Queen Willemina drank tea when the weather was too bad to sit outside. The Queen visited regularly, whenever the men of the royal family were out hunting at the nearby Bijhorst, because she didn’t like hunting. In this same room, the wedding party had a large dinner. In between two courses, a waiter came up to my mother and said there was a phone call for the bride. My mother went to the phone, which was a really old version, set in a cubicle with a door with glass in it. She picked it up and said her name with a really small voice and at the other end of the line was her sister, calling from Australia. She cried then and was very happy her sister had called. Sometime during the meal, her father also held a speech. My mother just hoped he wouldn’t get too sentimental, because she hates that and her father was known to get sentimental when he’d had some alcohol. Thankfully, he restrained himself from getting too sentimental.

Around eleven, or maybe even later, my parents drove home to Delft, with a car loaded with presents. A friend of theirs even drove with them to Delft in his own car, also loaded with presents. It was going to be the first night they would spend at their new apartment. When my parents came in, my mother noticed a stick with something on it, kind of like an popsicle stick, in one of the potted plants, and she immediately realized their friends had been inside the house. She called out a warning to my father, but she had to go to the toilet pretty bad, so she went straight there. When she opened the door to the toilet, she saw it was filled with balloons. My parents were now on their guard, and they inspected the bed. Lifting up the top sheets, they found the bed filled with peas. Carefully, they picked up all of the sheets, neatly folded them so no peas could escape, and deposited them in the living room. They were pretty tired, so my mother can’t really remember if she noticed then, or the next morning, that whomever had been inside the apartment had written on the bedroom window: shush, newly weds!

Sources:
Personal information from my mother

For privacy reasons, no pictures were included in this post, nor were any of the names of living people written out.

Fearless Females - Promt #3

2010-03-03T21:15:00.000+01:00

Do you share a first name with one of your female ancestors? Perhaps you were named for your great-grandmother, or your name follows a particular naming pattern. If not, then list the most unique or unusual female first name you’ve come across in your family tree.

No, I don't share a first name with one of my ancestors, which was delibiratly done by my mother. The 'female family name' is Henriette, which, unfortunately, is almost always shortened to Jet. My grandmother hated the shortening, and although she named my mother Henriette, she gave my mother a completely different calling name. My mother, in turn, did the same with me, giving me a completely different name.

When looking at my family tree, the name that jumps out the most is Catharina van Haastrecht. Most of the names of the females in the tree are fairly traditional, like Henriette, Alida, Petronella, Geertruida and Johanna. Catharina is fairly 'fancy' compared to the other names in the tree and so far, also unique.

Fearless Females - Promt #2

2010-03-02T20:55:00.000+01:00

Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo?

Henriette Geertruida Lamboo - approximately end of the 1950's - beginning of the 1960's

This picture shows my grandmother Henriette Geertruida Lamboo doing a puzzle. It was one of her favorite pastimes and I fondly remember the times when I would 'help' when I was little. I can hardly remember a time when there wasn't a half-done puzzle on the dining room table at my grandmother's when I went there. I still have several of her puzzles and sometimes, when I miss her, I get one out and put it together. The picture might not be of the best quality, but it's one of my favorites nevertheless.

Tombstone Tuesday - Bertje Knura

2010-03-02T15:37:00.000+01:00

Bertje Knura, whose official name is Lambertus Johannes Adolphus Knura, was born on Sunday 19 June 1955. A short six years later he died, on 11 September 1961. He was buried on 14 September 1961 at the Roman Catholic graveyard of the St. Laurentius church in Voorschoten. I wrote his biography in the post The Forgotten Uncle.

On 12 December 2009 I went to the small graveyard to look for his grave. I found it in the children's corner. I'm actually happy I went in winter time, even though it was freezing, because the rose bush in front of the headstone would've hidden the text completely if there were any leaves on it.

Text on the stone:

Onze lieve Bertje

19-6-'55 - 11-9-'61

Fam. Knura

Detail pictures below.

Fearless Females - Promt #1

2010-03-01T23:36:00.000+01:00

Do you have a favorite female ancestor? One you are drawn to or want to learn more about? Write down some key facts you have already learned or what you would like to learn and outline your goals and potential sources you plan to check.

My favorite female ancestor has to be Sophia Zbieszczyk. She's my great-grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandfather. I know nothing about her, except for her name, that she was married to Bergmann Josef Knura and had several children.

I'm fascinated by her, have been ever since my mother told me my grandfather had said, not long after I was born, that I was the spitting image of his mother. He continued to say this until the day he died, when I was not even two years old. Now, years later, I could be looking into a mirror when I look at a picture of Sophia in her younger years, when she has two, maybe three children.

To learn more about Sophia, I'd need to start with my grandfather's records in Germany. They won't be publicaly available for another four years, unfortunately, so I can't do much, for now. I patiently await the time until I can start digging into this woman's life and in the mean time, I am left to dream of how her life could've been.

The picture that leaves me feeling like I'm looking into a mirror. Sophia is the woman on the right with the baby in her arms.

Biography of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo

2010-03-01T16:46:00.003+01:00

I’m currently writing the series Looking for Lamboo, about the research I’m doing on the Lamboo branch of my family. At present, the series focuses on my research into the life of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo, my maternal grandmother. I’m a bit further along in my research then this series shows, but right now I’m a bit stuck, not knowing if there are any great gaps or which points I still have to look into. Therefore, I’m eagerly using this COG’s topic to write a biography of my grandmother with all the information I currently have, just to have an overview of things.

The first thing I did was make a timeline, which can be found here, in which I put the most important pieces of verified information I have about her. It gives a nice, clear overview of her life. In one quick scan, it becomes clear that after Henriette’s birth on 15 December 1913 until her marriage to Adolph Knura on 11 May 1938 I have no information. From her marriage on out, I can track her life fairly good, however the information that I have is pretty bare bones. It’s all dates and little personal information. Clearly, there is room for improvement there. Let’s take a closer look, because a timeline isn’t meant to hold all information and a biography highlights what you have so you know where to start looking.

Henriette’s birth is well documented. I know she was born to Anna Hendrika van Dijk and Bernardus Johannes Lamboo in Zoeterwoude on 15 December 1913. I know she wasn’t an only child, but so far I haven’t taken a look at the rest of the family yet. However, I do know that the part of Zoeterwoude she was born in alternated between being Zoeterwoude and Voorschoten. So without moving, she could’ve changed towns.

I’ve found nothing so far about her childhood, but there are some things I know without having to look for sources. I know she went to primary school, because she could read and write quite well and took great pleasure in it. I also know that in that time period here in the Netherlands we had what is called the ‘verzuiling’. Basically, it means that there were three ‘columns’ of people in the Netherlands that did not mix. Roman-Catholics, Protestans and the Liberals (which was basically everybody else). If you were Roman-Catholic, you went to a Roman-Catholic school, grocer, hairdresser, club, pub, etc. So, knowing she went to school, I also know she went to a Roman-Catholic School, most likely local. Since she lived in Voorschoten (or sometimes Zoeterwoude because of changing boundaries) all of her life, there’s really only one school she could’ve gone too. The local Roman-Catholic school. For after primary school, however, I do not know anything. She could’ve continued to study, most likely then in Leiden, or she could’ve stayed at home. I do not know.

When we get to 1938, however, we do go into a part of her life that’s pretty well sourced. On 21st of April 1938 a letter notifying the family of the marriage ban of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo and Adolph Knura was send. In it was also the invitation to the wedding, which was to take place on Wednesday 11 May 1938 at the Roman-Catholic church of H. Laurentius in Voorschoten, at 9.30 in the morning. It also gave the current addresses of Henriette and Adolph and the address of their new home, which they would move in after the wedding. Further sources show that the wedding did indeed take place on this day.

Wedding picture of Adolph Knura and Henriette Geertruida Lamboo - 11 May 1938, Voorschoten

A little more than a year later, the first child, a daughter, is born on 29 May 1939. On 1 September of that same year, Nazi-Germany invades Poland and World War II has officially begun. On 10 May 1940 Germany invades the Netherlands. It has to have been a tense time for my grandparents, seeing that my grandfather was German, not neutralized at the time, and most of his family still lived in Germany. On 16 March 1941 Henriette had her second child, another girl.

Henriette Geertruida Lamboo with either her first daughter or her second daughter - approximately 1939-1941

Sometime after this, my grandfather Adolph was drafted into service. He was basically told to either serve in the German army or his family would be deported to a prison camp, or worse. There really wasn’t a choice and my grandfather left. Henriette stayed behind with two young children. Family tales are that she helped Jews during this time, but I haven’t been able to find out anything definite yet. At the end of the war, my grandfather was injured in the fight against Russia. He was send to a hospital in the Netherlands, according to family tales, from which he escaped and made his way back to my grandmother and his two daughters. Not long after that, the Netherlands were freed.

Five years after the war on 1 May 1950 Henriette and Adolph have another child, a boy this time. Five years might seem like a big gap, but I know that my grandmother had at least two miscarriages, so one of them could very well have been in this gap. Another three boys follow quite rapidly, on 27 October 1951, 25 November 1953 and 19 June 1955. Then, at 45 years of age, against all odds and expectations, my grandmother has another child on 27 March 1959. It’s another girl this time, my mother.

A mere two years later, tragedy strikes the family as they lose their youngest son, Lambertus Johannes Adolphus Knura. He’s only six years old. He’s buried in the children’s section of the Roman-Catholic cemetery of the Roman-Catholic church of H. Laurentius in Voorschoten and my grandmother continued to visit his grave at least several times a year until she died.

From 1961 until 1973 I have virtually no documentation about my grandmother’s life. However, in 1973 Adolph and Henriette celebrate 35 years of marriage. There’s no real documentation, but I do have pictures of the party. The same goes for the party they threw 5 years later for their 40th wedding anniversary.

However, their 50th wedding anniversary in 1988 was quite a party, and I have more sources about that than just the pictures.

Picture of 50th wedding anniversary party of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo and Adolph Knura - 11 May 1988

In fact, in one of my grandfather’s In Memoriam’s, written by Willem van der Linden in name of the entire soccer club, this party is mentioned:

Almost two years ago we got to do something in return, even if it was very little in comparison. For the occasion of the party for his 50 years of marriage, which Dolf was anticipating eagerly, we had the opportunity to show Dolf and his wife our great appreciation for everything this couple has done for us.

As can be ascertained from the above piece, two years later, to be precise on 30 January 1990, Adolph Knura dies. Not long after that my grandmother moves out of the house she had lived in since shortly after the second World War and into a smaller home in a compound especially for self-sufficient elderly people. From that time onwards it is that my memories of her begin. I remember visiting there, the candy she always gave that you always had to check to see if it hadn’t gone bad. I remember the way we could talk for hours, I remember the hugs. I remember some precious gifts she gave me, just because.

I also remember being on holiday in Mexico, to celebrate my parent’s being married for 25 years. I remember getting a call at 5 o’clock local time on 27 December. We’d celebrated Christmas two days before. Had an after-party of sorts the day before. When we got the call, we knew it was bad news. Nobody ever calls at that time, especially not when you’re on holiday, with good news. We heard that my grandmother had fallen ill, been taken to the hospital and had been operated upon. The operation had gone well, but she now had an infection and the doctors didn’t expect her to survive. We needed to come home, immediately. I remember being numb, mostly. An ocean away from the place you most want to be. To have something to do, I started packing the suitcases, while my parents tried to contact the insurance and travel agency to get us on a flight home. When the suitcases were packed, I turned on the tv. We could receive CNN, and on it we saw the news of tsunami’s that had devastated so many people. At that point in time, I really couldn’t bring myself to care. The magnitude of that disaster missed me and my family completely, because we were dealing with a tragedy so much closer to home. My memories of that morning are patchy. I remember sitting in the lobby of the hotel, crying, when a Canadian woman came up to me and asked me if I was all right. We talked for awhile about my grandmother. She was nice, but if she ever told me her name, it didn’t penetrate my brains. I also remember another Canadian offering to buy us tickets back to the Netherlands if we couldn’t arrange anything. Eventually, we had a flight for all three of us, and at around 10 o’clock local time we headed to the airport of Cancun. On the way to Mexico we had a direct flight, but now we had a stop in Houston for an hour and a half. With all the new security measures in place, we barely made it to the plane in time. It was a flight of over 10 hours, from Houston to Amsterdam. The first thing we did upon landing, while waiting for the luggage, was call somebody for an update on my grandmother. She’d died while we were up in the air, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

My grandmother died on 27 December 2004, having achieved one of her greatest wishes, never to live in a nursing home. Until the day she died, she lived on her own, took care of her own. In the end, I’m grateful we never made it to the hospital on time. She never woke up after the operation, so talking to her one last time wouldn’t have been possible, and according to my uncle she’s looked terrible. It’s better to remember her for the vibrant, smart, sometimes ‘catty’ woman she was.

Sources:
Personal knowledge J. Mulder, granddaughter of Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo
Persoonslijst: CBG, persoonslijst Henriette Geertruida Lamboo (1913-2004).
Ondertrouw aankondiging van A. Knura en H.G. Lamboo, 21 April 1938, Voorschoten, Zuid-Holland, Familiearchief Mulder, Voorschoten
"Bidprentje Lambertus Johannes Adolphus 'Bertje' Knura," 14 september 1961, Voorschoten, Familiearchief J. Mulder, Voorschoten
In Memoriam voor Adolph Knura uit de krant," undated clipping, February 1990, from unidentified newspaper; Familiearchief Mulder; privately held 2010 by J. Mulder, J. Mulder, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Voorschoten
Persoonskaart, CBG, Den Haag; Adolph Knura (1914-1990)

End totals Winter 2010 GeneaBloggers Games

2010-02-26T22:08:00.002+01:00

Category 1: 30 citations - Gold medal!

Category 2: Whoops, I didn't do anything here. No medals...

Category 3: 2 complete tasks - Zilver medal! (I also partially did two other tasks, which I'm quite pleased with)

Category 4: All five tasks completed - Platinum medal!

Category 5: Completed 5 tasks - Platinum medal!

Category 6: Two tasks completed - Zilver medal!

All in all, I think I accomplished quite a lot, and I'm very happy with everything I did these games!

Daily Stats 2010 GeneaBlogger Winter Games - Tuesday 23th February

2010-02-26T22:04:00.003+01:00

Categroy 1: 1 citation
Category 4, task B done.

Totals are in a seperate post today, because it's the last day of the games!

Timeline Henriette Geertruida Lamboo

2010-02-23T14:53:00.003+01:00

Here is a timeline of the major events in Henriette Geertruida Lamboo's life. You can scroll through her life, zoom in and out to get a better picture and if you stand over a picture or a fact in the timeline, more information appears.

This timeline was made on TimeRime.com and is a visual illustration of the biography of Henriette Geertruida Lamboo, which has much more and much more detailed information.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #8

2010-02-23T05:12:00.000+01:00

This week's challenge: Discover online map collections. Historical maps are wonderful tools for historical research. Fortunately for genealogists, many map collections are located online. Some of the more prominent collections are: the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Take some time to browse each of these collections. You may also want to check the library web site of your local university (or one near your ancestral home) to see what maps they may have online. If you have a genealogy blog, write about any special maps you find during this activity.

I looked through several map collections. Here's what I found.

David Rumsey Map Collection

Earliest map of the Netherlands 1702, latest is of 1930.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

Only one map, 1559-1609 period

Leidse Atlas van Blaeu – Regional Archive Leiden

Maps of around 1650, pretty detailed for the Netherlands, includes lots of places my ancestors lived.

Watwaswaar.nl

Best find. Site of the Netherlands, maps with additional info, like headcounts, etc. Very detailed. Very good for searching. All kinds of time periods.

I really liked this challenge, because I found the watwaswaar site, which I never would've done without it. It's going to be great fun to look through it when I want to do some additional searches for my ancestors.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #7

2010-02-22T01:57:00.000+01:00

Last week's challenge (because I'm late, again): Play with Google Maps. This is a helpful tool for determining the locations of addresses in your family history. Where your ancestral homestead once stood may now be a warehouse, a parking lot or a field. Perhaps the house is still there. When you input addresses in Google Maps, don’t forget to use the Satellite View and Street View options for perspectives that put you were right there where your ancestors once stood. If you’ve used this tool before, take sometime and play with it again. Push all the buttons, click all the links and devise new ways it can help with your personal genealogy research. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with Google Maps, or suggest similar easy (and free) tools that have helped in your own research.

I really liked the Google maps option to pinpoint locations. I think it can be a real good illustration for people or families that moved around a lot. Below is a map where I pinpointed the address where my grandparents (Adolph Knura and Henriette Geertruida Lamboo) lived right after they were married.

Grotere kaart weergeven

I also liked the Streetview option, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the pictures are recent. Below is the Streetview picture of the address from the map above, but I know these houses are all new. This wasn't how it looked when my grandparents lived there. Still, it's nice to see.

All in all, I like Google maps, but mostly for the pinpointing feature and not so much the streetview option.

Daily Stats 2010 GeneaBlogger Winter Games - Sunday 21st February

2010-02-21T22:10:00.002+01:00

Daily stats:

Category 4 :

Task A complete (pre-posted, will show tomorrow)

task C complete

task E complete

Category 5:

task A, I already had a summary, but changed it since it needed updating. My summary is the about-me piece on my profile

task B again, I already had a post in the COG that came on-line during the Games, but it was posted before the Games. Now I posted a post for the Smile For The Camera festival, but that festival won’t be on-line before the end of the Games

task C, I pre-posted several posts that will show up this week and next week

task F, I participated in challenge 7 and 8, both were pre-posted and will show up this week

Category 6:

task B, I added Bertje Knura’s gravestone to Find A Grave

Totals:

Category 1: 29 citations
Category 2: nothing
Category 3: task D complete (20 photo’s), task E complete (21 data entries) part of task B (3 digital file), part of task A (12 documents)
Category 4: task A complete, task C complete, task D complete, task E complete
Category 5: task A compete, task B complete, task C complete, task E complete, task F complete
Category 6: task A complete, task B complete

Surnames Wordcloud

2010-02-21T15:00:00.001+01:00

I made a wordcloud of all the surnames that are currently in my family tree. It can be seen here. This counts for task E of category 5 of the 2010 Genea Winter Games.

Looking Into the Face of My Great-Grandmother

2010-02-21T13:18:00.003+01:00

The picture below is one of the most special ones in my collection. The original is in the possesion of my grandmother, but I have the digital scan of it. On it is my great-grandmother Adriana Versloot, who's the mother of my grandfather Klaas Mulder. The picture is made in the Dutch East-Indies. It is the only picture of Adriana that I know of.

Adriana Versloot has been a mystery woman for a long time. My grandfather never spoke of her to me. In fact, he barely talked about her at all. All I knew was that she died in World War II in a Japanese internment camp, quite horribly if the family stories are true. I also knew she was married to Salomon Mulder, who was a marine and stationed in the Dutch East-Indies before the war broke out. She also had to have been in Den Helder in 1924, as my grandfather was born there that year. My granfather also had an older sister, but I didn't know where she was born.

Now, of course, I am much further in my research then I was when I first saw the photograph. I now know where Adriana was born, where she was married, I can follow her from Den Helder to Rotterdam and back (several times). I know where and when my grandfather's sister was born, I know the family was still in the Netherlands in 1936, so the picture must have been taken after 1936. I also know when and whereAdriana died and where she's buried.

Still, she's very much a mystery lady. I’m currently working on finding out in which camps she was during her internment and if I can find out how she died. I also haven’t found their departure date to the Dutch East-Indies yet. But, I’m still looking and there are many sources I haven’t seen/used yet. Perhaps one day I can look at this picture and feel that I at least know her a bit.

This post was written for the 21st edition of Smile For The Camera.

Daily Stats 2010 GeneaBlogger Winter Games - Monday 15th and Thursday 18th and Saturday 20th February

2010-02-20T20:42:00.004+01:00

These stats are from last Monday. I've got the flu right now, so I haven't done anything since Monday and I didn't post those stats yet. I might have enough energy to do a little bit before the deadline Friday, I sure hope so.

Stats from Monday:

18 citations, 19 data entries, 12 documents filed, genea-good-deed (I shared data with another genealogist and supplied him with some missing data; although I admit I received a lot in return.), made a page for my blog on which to house my series: Genealogy in the Netherlands, looked at some articles about research in Germany at FamilySearch.

Stats from Thursday:

The 90th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy was posted and I'm in it. I'm counting that as task B of category 5.

Stats from Saturday:

I commented on all the posts of the COG and although I knew quite a few of the blogs, I also encountered some new ones. So task A of category 6 is complete.

Overall stats:

Category 1: 29 citations
Category 2: nothing
Category 3: task D complete (20 photo’s), task E complete (21 data entries) part of task B (3 digital file), part of task A (12 documents)
Category 4: task D complete
Category 5: task B complete, task E complete
Category 6: task A complete

Daily Stats 2010 GeneaBlogger Winter Games - Sundat 14th February

2010-02-14T18:42:00.003+01:00

The stats for today:

Category 1: 9 citations
Category 3: Task B: 2 digital files & task E: 2 data entries
No things accomplished in the other categories.

My running total in the categories is:

Category 1: 11 citations
Category 2: nothing
Category 3: task D complete (20 photo’s), part of task B (3 digital files) and part of task E (2 data entries)
Category 4: nothing
Category 5: nothing
Category 6: nothing

Looking for Lamboo Part I: The First Step

2010-02-14T18:35:00.005+01:00

When making New Year’s genea-resolutions for 2010, I announced my plans for two series. Yesterday I posted the first part of the Genealogy in the Netherlands series and today I am posting the first of my second series: Looking for Lamboo. In this series I will research the Lamboo line and their partners and show you exactly what I am doing and what I find. I hope this will help illustrate some of the sources I will talk about in the Genealogy in the Netherlands series and also show the lives of this branch of my ancestors.

My research in the Lamboo family branch starts with my grandmother Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo. From personal knowledge I know she was born on 15 December 1913 in Zoeterwoude, Zuid-Holland and died on 27 December 2004 in a hospital in Den Haag, Zuid-Holland. She was married to Adolph Knura, who died on 31 January 1990, and her wedding date was 11 May 1938.

The first step in looking for more information is looking up all available primary sources. All of her records at the civil registration are not yet released to the public, but I can access her persoonslijst. I requested it and below in the pictures you can see the two pages. I blacked out all info on her living children. Translation follows below the pictures. My own comments are in the brackets. Clicking on the picture will enlarge them so they can be read.

>PERSON
First names: Henriette Geertruida
(Sur)name: Lamboo
Birth date: 15-12-1913 [15 December 1913]
Birth place: ZOETERWOUDE
Birth country: the Netherlands
Gender: Female

>PARENT 1
First names: Anna Hendrika
Prefix: van
(Sur)name: Dijk
Birth date: 03-10-1881 [3 October 1881]
Birth place: ‘S GRAVENHAGE [also named Den Haag]
Birth country: the Netherlands
Gender: Female

>PARENT 2
First names: Bernardus Johannes
(Sur)name: Lamboo
Birth date: 21-07-1883 [21 July 1883]
Birth place: VOORSCHOTEN
Birth country: the Netherlands
Gender: Male

>NATIONALITY
Nationality: Dutch

>MARRIAGE (REGISTERD PARTENERSHIP)
First names: Adolph
(Sur)name: Knura
Birth date: 01-07-1914 [1 July 1914]
Birth place: Bottrop
Birth country: Germany
Date dissolvement: 30-01-1990 [30 January 1990]
Place dissolvement: LEIDEN
Country dissolvement: the Netherlands
Reason dissolvement: Death partner
Kind of contract: Marriage

>MARRIAGE (REGISTERD PARTENERSHIP) (Historical)
Date of contract: 11-05-1938 [11 May 1938]
Place of contract: VOORSCHOTEN
Country of contract: the Netherlands
Kind of contract: Marriage

>DEATH
Date of death: 27-12-2004 [27 December 2004]
Place of death: ‘S GRAVENHAGE [also named Den Haag]
Country of death: the Netherlands

>REGISTRATION [data about time persoonslijst was made]
PK-place: VOORSCHOTEN [where persoonskaart was at time of making the list]
PK completely converted: PK-date completely converted [all data on persoonskaart was available to enter on the persoonslijst]

>PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Place of registration: VOORSCHOTEN
Date of registration: 14-11-1917 [14 November 1917]
Valid from: 22-01-1991 [22 January 1991]

>PLACE OF RESIDENCE (Historical)
Place of registration: VOORSCHOTEN
Date of registration: 14-11-1917 [14 November 1917]

[This same information is repeated four more times, maybe moves? Hard to say without address data]

[Below the place of residence (historical) data is the data of the children. There are seven children, the youngest is at the top, the oldest is last on the second page. I blacked out the data of the living children, but I left the information about Bertje, whom I wrote about here, as he died when he was six]

>CHILD
First names: Lambertus Johannes Adolphus
(Sur)name: Knura
Birth date: 19-06-1955 [19 June 1955]
Birth place: VOORSCHOTEN
Birth country: the Netherlands

The most valuable information I got from this persoonslijst is the only primary data available on Henriëtte’s birth, marriage and death, and also all of the birth data on her children. Furthermore, this document brings me one generation back, as I now know the names, birth dates and birth places of her parents. Also, it leads me to believe she might have moved several times, since there are 5 historical place of residence entries. This might not mean anything, but it’s worth to keep in mind.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the primary sources available for Adolph Knura to see if we can find some additional information that’s not on Henriëtte’s persoonslijst.

Sources:
Personal knowledge J. Mulder, granddaughter of Henriëtte Geertruida Lamboo
Persoonslijst: CBG, persoonslijst Henriette Geertruida Lamboo (1913-2004).

Daily Stats 2010 GeneaBlogger Winter Games - Saturday 13th February

2010-02-13T23:02:00.000+01:00

Just a quick row of stats:

Category 1: 2 citations
Category 2: nothing
Category 3: task D complete (20 photo’s) en part of task B (1 digital file)
Category 4: nothing
Category 5: nothing
Category 6: nothing

Genealogy in the Netherlands: Primary sources after 1811 part I – Persoonslijsten

2010-02-13T19:08:00.004+01:00

Welcome to this series about Genealogy in the Netherlands. The first part is about primary sources after 1811 in the Netherlands. They will be discussed in three posts, discussing the three primary sources that are available in the Netherlands. These primary sources will give you the basic facts, birth, marriage and death dates, of anyone born after 1811. If a person is born before 1811, but married or died after 1811, some information can also be found in these sources. These sources, however, are good to look at for more than just these primary facts. Many of them give more information than just the three basic dates.

The first primary source you’ll encounter if you work backwards in time is the persoonslijst. Every person of Dutch nationality that died on or after 1 October 1994 in the Netherlands (colonies and the Antilles do not count and will not be discussed here) will have a persoonslijst. A persoonslijst can be requested two calendar years after a person died. This has to be done in writing at the Central Bureau of Genealogy in The Hague. (See www.cbg.nl for more information)

The persoonslijst is a simple computer printout, but carries a wealth of information about the person. This is the information that can be found on a persoonslijst:

a. Surname of the person
b. First names of the person
c. Birth date and birth place
d. Nationality
e. Names, birth dates and birth places of the parents, as far as they were entered on the persoonskaart
f. Data about marriages of the person, if they were married. This data was transcribed from the persoonskaart.
g. Addresses. This isn’t an obligatory field, but most cards have at least one address on it, with date as to when the person lived there, but some cards contain more addresses, and you can follow a person when he or she moves around.
h. Date and place of death
i. Children, mentioned are surname, first names, birth date and place. Children appear on the persoonslijst of the father and of the mother. Note: when the persoonslijst was made, it was mandatory to note all children born after 1 January 1966 on their parent’s persoonslijst. Children born before 1 January 1966 could be left out of the administration, so beware of this when looking at this field. Also, the youngest child is listed first, and the oldest is listed last.

If you want to properly source a persoonslijst, use this format: Persoonslijst: CBG, persoonslijst [first names and surname] ([year of birth]-[year of death].

For an example of a persoonslijst and what can be gleaned from it, see Looking for Lamboo part I.

For other posts in this series, see the How-to Guide to Genealogy in the Netherlands.

Winter 2010 GeneaBloggers Games Opening Ceremony

2010-02-12T22:25:00.005+01:00

This flag represents my and my heritage. The Dutch flag is in there for my three Dutch grandparents and their ancestors, the German flag is for my German grandfather and his ancestors and the Australian one is because part of my family lives in that country.

I'm very excited to participate in the Winter 2010 GeneaBloggers Games! I'll be joining in all the categories:

1. Go Back and Cite Your Sources!
2. Back Up Your Data!
3. Organize Your Research!
4. Expand Your Knowledge
5. Write, Write, Write!
6. Reach Out & Perform Genealogical Acts of Kindness

Not only is this going to be so much fun, it'll really help my research too! (Especially the second and third category)

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #6

2010-02-11T17:37:00.000+01:00

This week's challenge: Online databases at your public library. Search your library’s web site and see if your card grants you access to online databases. Libraries (even small ones) often have wonderful online tools including genealogy databases, historical newspapers and more! Take some time and play with these little perks that come with a library card. You just may get some help in your own genealogy research and gain some free research tools to boot. If you don’t know how to access online library databases or you’re not sure if your branch has them, ask a librarian for guidance. If you have a blog, discuss which databases (if any) to which your library subscribes.

I never would've thought to look at the databases my library subscribes too if it were not for this challenge! But this challenge was there, and I did look. And boy, did I find some useful things. I haven't been able to search them yet, because for most you need to be at the library to access them, but they hold promise. The databeses that were interesting to me:

Several newspaper and documentation databases.
Leidse letteren database (Literature from Leiden and surroundings)
Leidse Canon (Local history)

Especially the newspaper and documentation databases could come in handy.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #5

2010-02-11T05:32:00.000+01:00

The challenge for week 5 was: Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, but the vast size of the network makes it an important genealogy tool. If you are looking for a specific book or publication, enter the identifying information into the WorldCat search box and see which libraries hold the item. You may even find that you can get the item through your library’s inter-library loan program. Don’t forget to search for some of your more unusual surnames and see what comes up. The goal is to play with WorldCat and examine its possibilities for your own research. If you’re already familiar with WorldCat, play with it again. The network and collection grow and change constantly. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with searching WorldCat for this exercise.

I played around with WorldCat for awhile, but it wasn't really helpful. Our ILL systen has a great website with search-function, so WorldCat couldn't tell me anything new there. I only have two uncommon surnames in my family tree so far, and neither one produced anything useful. Still, it's a good site to bookmark and check once in awhile.