Meubelmaker to gedoogstatus

A handful of Dutch words carry much of this site, and they do not translate cleanly because each is part of the record. An advertisement named a trade, the gazette printed a company form, and the city kept a particular kind of archive card. Where the word is the evidence, the site keeps it in Dutch and glosses it once. The glosses here follow the sense the sources use, which is not always a dictionary's.

One of them is easier to show than to define. The population register kept a card for each household, the gezinskaart, with the family listed on it and the addresses they moved through recorded on the card.

This card belongs to the Beens household and records the head of the family as a furnishing-company director. Along its typed address line the Rotterdam addresses end at Rochussenstraat 169b and then 169c. The card also records the household's ex-officio removal to Teddington, near London, on 3 August 1931. An address book printed once a year never gives a date that exact.

The words, in order

• adresboek: the annual Rotterdam address book, listing residents and firms street by street; the backbone of the occupancy record, though it leaves out the cheapest homes (weekly-let dwellings below a set rental value), so a silence in it is never proof that nobody lived there.
• akte: a formal act or deed: a birth, marriage or death entry in the civil registers, or a notarial deed.
• ambacht: an old rural manorial district and jurisdiction, as in the Ambacht van Cool on which the quarter was built.
• behanger: a paperhanger; one of the furnishing trades, often paired with upholstery.
• bevolkingsregister: the municipal population register, kept by household rather than by person.
• Bouwpolitie: the municipal building-control office that received permit applications and inspected the work.
• engros: wholesale (en gros): selling to the trade rather than over a counter.
• fabriek: factory or works, the production side of a furnishing concern. At this address the fabriek was Rochussenstraat 169, while the magazijn was on Witte de Withstraat 57¹.
• firma (Fa.): a business trading under a firm name.
• firmanten: the partners in a firm, as named in the address book's partnership listing; the Van Duffelen & Pelt entries name G. J. van Duffelen and Corn. Pelt as its firmanten².
• gedoogstatus: a tolerated status without a legal title. The building's squat years were probably governed by an informal tolerated arrangement³.
• gezinskaart: a family card in the population register, one per household, carrying its members and its run of addresses.
• halfwas: a half-trained hand, an improver, as in the meubelmakers-halfwas the firm advertised for at the corner.
• Handelsregister: the commercial register kept by the Chamber of Commerce, recording firms and their officers.
• Hinderwet: the Nuisance Act, under which an establishment that might trouble its neighbours needed a licence, machinery being the usual trigger.
• kantoorbediende: an office clerk; Johan Andries van Duijn gave it as his occupation in 1912⁴.
• kraakpand: a squatted building.
• magazijn: in these firms' usage the retail store or showroom, the sales side set against the fabriek, the factory (the corner's magazijn stood on the Witte de Withstraat, its fabriek at Rochussenstraat 169); more generally, a warehouse or stockroom.
• meubelfabriek: a furniture factory, the firm-scale version of the trade.
• meubelfabrikant: a furniture manufacturer; by 1909 it was the firm's trade description, while the 1899 deed called both founders meubelmaker^5 6.
• meubelmaker: a cabinet-maker: the maker of furniture, not a carpenter.
• N.V. (naamlooze vennootschap): a limited joint-stock company, in the period's spelling.
• opheffingsuitverkoop: a closing-down or clearance sale.
• pandkaart: a card for a single building, the archive's record of one address.
• polder: low land kept dry behind a dyke by drainage; the ground the whole quarter stands on.
• procuratiehouder: the holder of a firm's procuration, an authorised signatory or manager.
• Staatscourant: the official state gazette, where partnerships, dissolutions and honours were printed.
• stoffeerder: an upholsterer.
• toonkamer: a showroom.
• wal: a rampart or embankment, here on the line of an old dyke rather than a watercourse: the 's-Gravendijkwal follows the 's-Gravendijk recorded in 1358.
• woninginrichting: home furnishing, both as a trade and as a kind of firm, and often part of a firm's own name.