It was a sunny Saturday morning in June. I arrived at 9.45am in Bergen op Zoom, a former military town in the western part of the province of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands. This was the moment that I would meet an American couple: Jim and Kathy VanVliet of Tacoma, Washington. Four months earlier they asked me Read more…
Linda Van Drunen Crawford from Austin, Texas wrote me this February. She found information about her paternal line before, all the way back to the 1750s, and had plans to come to the Netherlands at the end of April and the beginning of May. She really wanted to visit the area where her ancestors once Read more…
In the fall of 2008 I attended the inauguration of a professor at Tilburg University. In the auditorium, I noticed a group of men in black suits with red sashes. I had no idea who they were and why they were in the audience. But their appearance impressed me. After the ceremony, one of the Read more…