I know what my mother is getting me for Christmas – a verjaardagskalender! I know this because I was there when she bought it. She even let me pick it out. Now I’ll have one for each of our bathrooms.
Week 50 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Traditions”. While it might be described more as a custom than a tradition, with a new year bearing down on us I’d like to think of a verjaardagskalender (“birthdays calendar”) as a tradition.
One of two verjaardagskalenders that I own (with names redacted).
A typical Dutch bathroom isn’t complete without a verjaardagskalender, a perpetual calendar that is used for keeping track of birthdays and anniversaries. Why is it hung in the bathroom? Because it’s a place where you’ll always see it, so you’ll never forget or miss an important family milestone.
When I visit my Dutch relatives in the Netherlands and Canada, I always take note to look at their verjaardagskalendars. I’ve even photographed all the pages of a few (with permission!). It’s a great way of finding those elusive birthdays, and finding out who is part of the extended family.
The verjaardagskalender that hangs in our kids’ bathroom.
Just be forewarned – if you ever see a verjaardagskalender when visiting a Dutch friend, do not add your own name! It would be the height of rudeness and impropriety to do so. And if you see your name on it, consider it an honour – you’re considered one of the family!
The greatest genealogical help I received began 26 years ago this summer. It started with a simple invitation I spotted on a message board. Someone was planning a visit to a Dutch archive later in the week and was offering to do a lookup for anyone who might be interested.
Two things immediately came to mind when I saw this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge theme, “Help”. First was the earworm that has resulted in the Beatles’ song bouncing around in my head all day. Second was my friend Nol, who over the years has provided me with an incredible amount of help in researching the Dutch side of my family.
Back in the early days of online research in the 1990s, there wasn’t the variety or depth of resources that we now enjoy today. One source I found said that as of 1996, there were only 10 million users of the internet world-wide. While many libraries, archives, and genealogical societies had begun to stake out a presence, they weren’t yet able to provide the scope of digital materials that are so easily accessible today. It was still often necessary to obtain documents the old-fashioned way, by using the mail. Bulletin boards and Usenet were still a common way of connecting with other genealogists.
Johannis Albertus van der Fluit (1894 – 1932), the subject of my first query to Nol.
While I know it was sometime in early September 1996, I can’t remember where I first saw the original post I saw by Nol (short for “Arnoldus”), or whether it was a message board or something else. It was just a brief statement saying that he was going into a local archive the next day and asking whether he could look anything up for anyone while he was there. I contacted him and asked him if he’d be willing to look up one name for me, my great grandfather Johannis Albertus van der Fluit.
Nol emailed me the next day, telling me that the information I needed was held in the Noord Holland Archives in Haarlem (Noord-Hollands Archief). To my good fortune, Nol lives in Haarlem. He said he would be going into the archive sometime later in the week and he would get back to me.
My first email from Nol after we moved off the message boards. Later in our correspondence, I learned that the family line of Nol’s wife intersected with mine.
Nol followed up less than a week later. Not only had he looked up my great grandfather, but he looked up all four of my father’s paternal great grandparents (my great great grandparents). Furthermore, Nol took it further and looked up several of my great great great grandparents. The email he sent me set out a summary of the birth records for each of them, including the record numbers, dates and places of birth, each person’s parents’ names, the names of the witnesses, and the occupations of the persons named in the records.
While I had some prior knowledge, my early exchanges with Nol provided a significant introduction to the nomenclature with which I am now so familiar, including the types civil institutions and records sources (such as the “Burgerlijke Stand” – civil register), the municipal system of local governance (“gemeente”), population registers, and the Dutch words and phrases associated with genealogical research. So not only has Nol been a mentor in Dutch genealogy, I have often relied upon him as a language coach as I tried to teach myself Dutch. No Duolingo back then!
Over the next two years and over fifty emails, Nol provided me with countless records summaries: births, marriages, and deaths of ancestors and cousins from all over Noord Holland. I still have a copy of each and every one of them. I originally converted each email into a WordPerfect document. Over the years I have updated the format in which they’re saved and made sure that they remain accessible. I still go back to them often. One time several years ago I went through them again, one by one from the beginning, to ensure that I squeezed them for every drop of information I could gather.
The timing during which our paths crossed online resulted in a much longer and deeper relationship than what might have resulted had we met online nowadays. Dutch archives are amazing in how much they’ve scanned and made available online for free. Nowadays, over the course of a week I could probably find scanned online images of everything Nol found for me over that two-year period of in-person archival visits. In fact, over the last many years, I pretty much have found and downloaded digital images of all those records. So while we might still have become acquainted online, I would not have been as reliant on Nol as I might have been in the present.
Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to reciprocate Nol’s incredible kindness. He needs more Canadian relatives! Despite that, what makes me particularly happy is that our connection has evolved into much more of a friendship, particularly given that he and I connected in the early days of Facebook. Our connection has reached a point that I often forget the genealogical origins of our relationship.
My only regret is that in the 26 years I have known Nol, we have never met in person. Pre-COVID, he often visited the United States, but his travels mainly took him to the east coast. From where I am on the west coast of Canada, the eastern seaboard of the United States is about as far as Baghdad is from Amsterdam. Not exactly a trip down the street. It’s also why I don’t know your cousin in Toronto. 😂
This is why my Dutch relatives and I have such different points of view about long road trips.
I have only been to the Netherlands twice. The first time was before I met Nol. My last trip there occurred in 2017. I had hoped that I could meet Nol at that time, as I was literally going to be in Haarlem during part of my trip. Unfortunately, at the same time I was in the Netherlands, Nol was in the United States. Wat jammer, as you might say in Dutch.
I am still hoping that one day our paths might cross in real life. Nevertheless, I am grateful for all the help, mentoring, and friendship Nol has provided to me over the years. The depth of my gratitude is profound. Dank je wel, Nol!
For theme of this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge, “Extended Family”, we are invited to write about relatives other than our direct ancestors: aunts, uncles, cousins, nibblings, or even those to whom we are related by marriage. So many options! After deliberating on the topic, I decided that the best and most impactful way to write on the topic would be to focus on a single relative. But whom? It did not take long to decide: my father’s aunt, Tante (“Aunt”) Anny.
My father actually had two Tante Annys, one on each side of his family. Both were wonderful women and I have very happy memories of both. I chose my Tante Anny on my grandmother’s side of the family because of the close and unique relationship we had.
Anna Adriana (“Anny”) van Kleef was born in Zuid-Scharwoude, Noord Holland in 1926. Anny was the third-born child of Arie Komen (who I wrote about last week) and Elizabeth Bakker. Zuid-Scharwoude is part of the larger “gemeente” (municipality) of Langedijk (which recently merged with a neighbouring gemeente and is now “Dijk en Waard”). Anny lived in Langedijk her whole life.
Tante Anny and Ome Nic during their visit to our home in Saskatchwan when I was 12
I first met Tante Anny when she and Ome (“Uncle”) Nic van Kleef came to visit Canada when I was 12. While they spent most of their time in Alberta with my grandparents, the four of them planned a road trip to the town in Saskatchewan where we were living at the time. I was so excited by their impending visit, because it would be my first time meeting any of our relatives who lived in the Netherlands. I went to our little bookstore and bought myself a Dutch-English phrase book to prepare for their visit.
I still have the phrase book that I bought when I was 12!
Tante Anny and I clicked right away, despite the fact she spoke no English and the only Dutch I knew was a few phrases I had memorized from my little book. A few days after she arrived, I came down with a small cold. She sat with me for hours while I lay on the couch with my sniffles. She chatted in Dutch, I responded in English, and we spoke a lot with our hands.
My grandparents, Arie van der Fluit and Christina Komen, with Tante Anny Komen and Ome Nic van Kleef
At the end of her visit, I asked Tante Anny for her address. We soon entered into a correspondence that we maintained until she passed away. I’d write in English, she’d write in Dutch. My father would translate her letters for me; Tante Anny’s children would translate my letters for her.
The first letter I received from Tante Anny. Here she’s writing about her return trip from Canada to the Netherlands and the weather at home.
When I moved away from home, I had to painstakingly translate Tante Anny’s letters with only a Dutch-English dictionary. It wasn’t easy, especially when it came to idiomatic phrases. There was no Google Translate back then! Once in a while I’d call my dad, but it wasn’t easy because I didn’t always know the pronunciation of what was written (although I definitely could pronounce the Dutch “g” early on). However, when you look up a word over and over and over again, after a while it sticks.
During my first trip to the Netherlands in 1990, my friend and I stayed with my Tante Anny and Oom Nic for two weeks. She still spoke no English. What little Dutch I knew back then I largely learned from reading her letters, supplemented by a bit of coaching from some Dutch-speaking friends and a Dutch translation of a Richard Scarry book. Nevertheless, we still managed to communicate quite well, and my English-speaking Dutch cousins were very encouraging in my attempts to speak their language. I was particularly happy to understand enough when she told me the stories about the old family photos in her albums. Perhaps the strangest thing was explaining to her what my grandmother – Tante Anny’s older sister – had written to her in a letter that arrived during my visit. It was then that I realized that my grandmother’s Dutch had become heavily Canadianized.
October 1990, on the last day of my stay with Oom Nic and Tante Anny at their home in Zuid-Scharwoude.
Upon my return to Canada, I discovered a night school class that gave me a few basics. However, reading those letters remained a challenge. Happily, with the advent of the internet and things like YouTube videos and DuoLingo, learning on my own has become easier. A few years ago I pulled out my cache of letters from Tante Anny. While my comprehension was not perfect, after so many years I was amazed by my ability to read her letters by myself, without constantly having to look up every second word.
Almost twenty years worth of letters from my great aunt.
I’m happy that in my letters I asked Tante Anny questions about the family history. With one letter, I enclosed a simple questionnaire and a pedigree chart that I spent a lot of time writing in Dutch, in order to make it easier for her to respond. I figured the easier I made it for her, the more likely it was that she’d fill them out. She did, although in her reply letter she queried why I’d want to know about something that was so uninteresting as family history. I often amuse myself by thinking she said that only because there is something interesting worth knowing that she didn’t want me to find. However, in the 25 years since she wrote that, I have not found anything that would support that idea.
I saw Tante Anny one last time in the summer of 1998. She came to Canada on her own to visit my grandmother in Alberta. My parents had moved back to Alberta a few years earlier, so Tante Anny stayed with them for a few days. I made sure to get out there for a visit, because I did not want to miss an opportunity to see her again. By then, I had expanded my efforts to learn Dutch as part of my genealogical pursuits. As a result, it was easy for Tante Anny and I to discuss my sister’s wedding video, which we watched during her visit. However, I was far from conversant on other topics. One night my Dutch was particularly bad and I knew I was making stupid mistakes, so it was no surprise when Tante Anny just waved her hand to indicate I was making little sense.
Tante Anny at my parents’ house, August 3, 1998.
I’m glad I was able to see Tante Anny during her visit, because she passed away two months later at age 72. Oom Nic, who was almost seven years older, survived Tante Anny by 15 years. He died in 2013 at age 93.
Many years ago I stumbled across the below photo on Flickr that might show my Tante Anny’s signature. It shows a panel of wood inside St. Jan de Doper Katholieke Kerk (“St. John the Baptist Catholic Church”) in Noord-Scharwoude with messages written in pencil. The large message in the centre reads “het koor schoongemaakt op 21 Oct 1943” (“the choir cleaned here on October 21, 1943”) and is signed by Annie Bakker and Annie Komen. Tante Anny would have been 17 years old at the time and this is the church she attended. I should ask my cousins if she was in the church choir. It would not surprise me, because my grandmother had been. Tante Anny’s mother was a Bakker, so Annie Bakker could have been a relative of hers.
Possible “graffiti” by my great aunt?Could this vandalism be the dark secret she was hiding when she told me family history isn’t interesting?😉
A Deck of Ancestors 