http://geneaknowhow.net/When my grandfather was a young boy, he liked to climb out of bed, climb halfway down the stairs and listen in on his family digging up (and sometimes making up) old stories late at night. Particularly on the rare occasions that his father's three brothers or his grandfather were there, the conversation would turn to family history. And when I was a young boy, staying with my grandparents, he enjoyed repeating them - as old people do. Strangely enough, none of it was boring: what to say of his mother's father, who died on the day of his 50th wedding anniversary, sitting on a wheelbarrow? Of his father's father, who time and time again travelled from Germany to his family in the Netherlands with knickerbockers filled with coffee and sugar without ever being caught by customs? Or of his death - standing near a hedge relieving the pressure on his bladder, when a tramcar overran him, his fly still undone? Or of the horrors of WWII - of special interest to me since I grew up in a village (Renkum) and a city (Arnhem) still strewn with ruins, bomb craters and bullet holes?
In the early 1980s, my then girlfriend got tired of me repeating these small tragedies and comedies, and gave me a book, an introduction to genealogy. I spent the next ten years in archives. Well, part of it. And of course I had the same interests any other genealogist has, however much he or she may deny it: is there a family crest? The answer, so far, is no. Is there nobility in my family? O yes, you bet: the Van den Eyndes of Holland and Zeeland, the Van den Abeeles of Dutch and Belgian Brabant, both descending from Charlemagne (I have my doubts there), and a few others. So what?
Yet the real fun lay elsewhere: in the reconstruction of biographies. If you're already interested in your family, there is no thrill like discovering that your great-grandfather and his three brothers married on the same day, or to read the newspaper clippings. And nothing as silly as discovering that your great-great-grandmother and one of your best and oldest friends' great-great-grandfather (I won't mention any names, but he owns Tarma) were once neighbours.
Over the years, I collected data on over 10,000 people. Discounting the suspicious link to Charlemagne, I traced back ancestors who lived as long ago as the early 1540s - although there is so little documentation on them that they are often nothing more than names and dates. By 1990, my very extended family included people from Gelderland, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Fryslân (Friesland), Flanders, East-Prussia, the German Rhineland, France, Bavaria, even (through Portugal) Israel. Some were poor (one even died in the poorhouse), some rich; some heroes, some criminals, one was even an executioner (and barber). They were Catholic, Old Catholic, Dutch Reformed of all flavours, Lutheran, Baptist, Remonstrant, Jewish, and so on - one (in the 1770s) was even officially "nothing". Some were day labourer, some colonel, cheese trader or manservant to the mayor of Rotterdam. And they all left traces - signatures, buildings, tramways, documents.
Unfortunately, I got a decent job in 1990 and have not found enough spare time (and energy) since then to continue my research. In the best of years, I have about a week to spend on it - usually with little success, as I've already gone through virtually all of the more easily accessible archives. Lately, that is, for the last five years, I'm focussing on one person only, Peter Wissenburg, of whom all I know with certainty is that he came from Moers in Germany, married in Elden near Arnhem in 1752, and died in the 1770s. Thanks to the fact that the godparents of his children are identifiable, I now have a trace - he appears to descend from a family Weissenburg who lived in Aachen, Germany between the 1550s and 1800s. But the final proof is missing.
Anyway, I won't bother you with a complete family tree. There is no fun in that. But here are a few of the gems I dug up, or created, in those ten years among the dust:
Probably the best place to start genealogical research on the Internet is Herman de Wit's site:
For a brief version of one of my lines of descent from Charlemagne, see Series 177 on the Charlemagne site:
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