I come from a long line of builders. My father started out as an engineer and road builder. After the Second World War he briefly worked for his father who owned a construction company. He married my mother in August 1948 and sometime after that they departed to Kinshasa in what was then the Belgium Congo, where he had taken a job in the road construction business. Back then it was called Léopoldville. He did not last long and after two years or so took a job as a director of the furniture manufacturing company in Albertville (now known as Kalemi) in the eastern part of the Congo. This is the place where I was born. We moved to Antwerp in Belgium when I was 2 years old. In Antwerp, dad was working on the restorations of the “Grote Kerk,” the main church in downtown Antwerp. We moved to the Caribbean in 1956 and lived 13 years in Curacao and a half year or so in Aruba. Dad started out in the road building industry, became a director of a construction company, and an architect. He continued managing the restoration of some of the old buildings along the harbor of Willemstad, the capital of Curacao. After moving back to the Netherlands, my father worked in the construction management field and traveled all over the world. He spent time in Germany, Turkey, Congo, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Indonesia before he finally retired.
Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900. The odd duck out was Karel, my father’s oldest brother. He ended up owning an optical store. Anyway, from the two brothers down to my great-grandfather they were all very skilled and talented carpenters. Even Herke, Karel's son, was a very accomplished woodworker.
I do not know much about my mother's side. Her father was not into building. Opa van den Ende was a butcher and owned a butcher shop in Terbregge a small suburb of Rotterdam. Mom (or Ma as we called her) had three brothers, one (Jan) died in a German concentration camp, and another (Cor) was an accountant. I do not know what the third brother (Siem) did. The only thing that is somewhat related to building is my mom's second nephew Ben. Ben was the owner of a kitchen installation and renovation company.
Naturally, one cannot help comparing all these folks that went ahead of me with my skills and abilities. However, together, my wife and I have renovated three bathrooms, including two in our current home. In Yemen I built my own house and a plant nursery and office; I also built a wooden play structure for our daughter, in Gallup, NM. In our current home my wife and I tiled a huge portion of our home (kitchen, breakfast room and library/stove room), we built two sheds from scratch and a woodshed. I also built a large built-in bookcase in our home. Finally, during the past 15 years I taught environmental compliance to folks in the construction industry. In other words, I dare say that I somewhat continued the family tradition in the building industry (sorry Opa van den Ende).
It is fun to see where your forefathers come from and how you fit in the continuing story of a family, of your life. And yes, I do believe there are healing properties in writing and paying respect to your forefathers. I am really not writing this as a self-gratification exercise, but also for my daughter, my future grandson, nieces and nephews. I believe that family history is important and honoring them by documenting their existence in this manner will hopefully make them live forever. We have such powerful tools to do this by being able to blog on the internet, unlike our forefathers who did not have these tools and depended on passing stories down orally. The internet can be a very useful tool when it is used in such a way, as opposed to constantly maligning one another, as is seen in the case of the social media where it is often done now, in our polarized world.
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| This is the only thing I have from my great-grandfather. It is a fishing basket he made. It is supposed to be suspended in the water to hold the fish you caught, and shaped in such a way that you can easily carry it laying on your side while hanging from a strap |
