Reading the Pelt gezinskaart

Cornelis Pelt was born in Rotterdam on 22 November 1856¹, and his household card gives his trade as meubelmaker, a cabinet-maker. He was in his forties when the corner works opened, and by then his household had passed through five recorded addresses on the way there². One document holds that whole history together: a household card of the population register, kept one card to a family. The Pelts' card is unusually legible, and it rewards a close reading.

The front: a household

The front lists the household, one person to a line. Cornelis heads it, with his birth on 22 November 1856³ and his trade, meubelmaker. Next come his marriage in the spring of 1882 and his wife, Jacoba Anna Muijser, born at the end of 1860. Below them run the children, a long column from 1883 to 1900.

There are eleven children, born between 1883 and 1900, and the column records more than their names. In a cabinet-maker's house, three of them appear to have a profession of their own. A daughter, Jacoba Anna (1885), is clearly entered as onderwijzeres, schoolmistress. As far as the hand can be read, the eldest child (1883) is entered as onderwijzer and another daughter, Antoinetta Agnes (1891), as a second onderwijzeres. Down the religion column the whole household is marked Nederlands Hervormd, Dutch Reformed.

Two of the eleven are called Cornelis. The first, entered higher up with a year that reads as 1885, did not live: on the back the card records an infant death during the family's years in the Erasmusstraat⁴. The name went again to one of the twins the card dates 24 November 1892, Cornelis and Jan Hendrik. The van Duffelen household across the courtyard did the same, passing a dead first son's name to a later child. This second Cornelis is probably the boy the family calls Cees⁵, who at six would lay the building's first stone on 3 June 1899⁶. The card is clear, but its lower dates are uncertain: it enters the twins on 24 November, while their birth act, shown below, gives the 21st.

The first stone is still there, carved into the building. Its inscription says it was laid by Gerrit van Duffelen, aged nine, and Cornelis Pelt, aged six, on 3 June 1899. In the original: DE EERSTE STEEN GELEGD door GERRIT VAN DUFFELEN OUD 9 JAAR en CORNELIS PELT OUD 6 JAAR 3 JUNI 1899⁷:

The carved first stone today, photographed in the building by the owner in 2026. The stone dates from 1899; the photograph does not⁸.

The acts behind the card

The civil registers spell out in full what the card squeezes into a line, and three of their pages are worth showing. Cornelis Pelt's birth act of 22 November 1856 has his father, another Cornelis Pelt, a winkelbediende or shop assistant, declaring a son of the same name⁹. The two witnesses were Reinier Romberg, a barber, and Willem Romberg. They share the surname of the mother, Anna Romberg, but the act never states their kinship to her¹⁰. The act gives the father's age as forty-eight, which cannot be squared with the ruim 90 of his 1909 death notice, so the elder Pelt's own birth year remains unresolved.

The act ends with the naming: welk kind zal genaamd worden Cornelis, the child shall be called Cornelis.

The marriage act is the fuller page, and the one document that sets both families down together. On 3 May 1882 Cornelis Pelt, meubelmaker, twenty-six, son of Cornelis Pelt the winkelknecht and Anna Romberg, married Jacoba Anna Muijser, twenty-one, daughter of the warehouseman Jan Hendrik Muijser and Anna Adriana van Buuren:

The witnesses were the bride's people: her two brothers, Johannes Willem Muijser, a shopkeeper, and Willem Hermanus Muijser, a letterzetter or typesetter, and her uncle Christoffel de Heer, a blacksmith. The act appears to end on a small human detail. Everyone present signed except one: the groom's mother, Anna Romberg, who, it records, had never learned how, zulks niet te hebben geleerd.

The register caught one of the children's births in unusual detail. The twins were born on 21 November 1892 in a house on the Spiegelnisserkade. Two days later, on the 23rd, the midwife who had attended, Johanna de Groot, declared them: two boys, in consecutive acts, to be named Cornelis and Jan Hendrik. The Cornelis of 1892 on the card, most likely the Cees who would lay the first stone, therefore arrived with a twin brother¹¹:

The back: a moving family

On the back of the card, the housing column tells the other half of the story. It lists the addresses in the order the family lived at them, with some arrival and departure dates and many that are faint or missing.

The moves run across the north-east of the city and then west to the corner: Crispijnlaan 132, Nieuwe Molenstraat 31, Crooswijkscheweg 201, a Spiegelnisser address at no. 38 (the card does not settle whether street or quay), and Erasmusstraat 31. All lie in or near Crooswijk, a working district of the eastern city¹². Erasmusstraat 31 was the last stop before the corner. The card enters the corner first under the street's provisional name, Coolhavenkade 169, and later as Rochussenstraat 169c^13 14. The address book lists him at the corner from its 1906 volume, when the building was still a single no. 169, in the street list on one page and in the alphabetical list of names on another¹⁵:

The card's housing column already puts the household there, under the provisional name Coolhavenkade 169, from about 1901¹⁶. By the 1911 street list the corner was split three ways: 169a the van Duffelen home, 169b the firm, 169c the Pelts¹⁷. The family kept 169c until the household left for Snellinckstraat 10a on 22 March 1921¹⁸.

The right-hand columns on the same side are fainter and only partly legible. They record the household's other movement: its members leaving one by one. As far as they can be read, there is a departure in 1910 to the family card of a Willem H. Wachter, which usually marks a marriage. There is a move to Schiedam the same year, beside which a later hand seems to have added Terug 1924, returned, in red. And there is a departure in December 1920 for Amsterdam, to the 1e van der Helststraat¹⁹. Even on a loose reading, the card shows people leaving, with moves to Schiedam and Amsterdam.

The card records both ends of the marriage it begins with. Its death column appears to note the head's death, and the register fixes it: Cornelis Pelt died on 15 January 1937, aged eighty²⁰. His wife Jacoba Anna Muijser outlived both him and the corner years. Her 1941 death act gives her age as eighty and calls her weduwe van Pelt, Cornelis: the widow who closed the family the card had opened nearly sixty years earlier.

The father next door

An older generation lived at one of those Crooswijk addresses too. When Cornelis Pelt's father died in the summer of 1909, the death notice gave his address as Erasmusstraat 29, next door to the family's Erasmusstraat 31.

The old man had reached a great age. The notice, for a Vader, Behuwd- en Grootvader, a father, father-in-law and grandfather, was signed by four of his children and a daughter-in-law: H., M., A. and Corn. Pelt, the founder himself, and J. H. Pelt–Muijser²¹. It confirms the district where the household card already places Cornelis himself. It is also a reminder that the man building a factory on the far side of town still had his father in Crooswijk, next door to the family's former home at Erasmusstraat 31.

By then Cornelis Pelt was a manufacturer in his own right. In July 1907 a cultural society's list of new members included "Corn. Pelt, meubelfabrikant, Rochussenstraat 169"²². The cabinet-maker who had moved his family from house to house was now a furniture manufacturer at a fixed address.

What the card cannot give

The card gives the addresses, but not the houses. No known photograph shows any of the Pelt homes themselves. Two of the addresses that can still be found on a modern map are not even his buildings: the block at Spiegelnisserstraat 38 was rebuilt in an urban-renewal scheme of 1976–77, and Snellinckstraat 10a, the house he died in, was redeveloped in 2004²³. What survives is the neighbourhood, seen at one remove, in period picture postcards of the Crooswijkscheweg, where he lived at no. 201, and of the streets around it²⁴. They show the quarter he moved his family through, and no picture comes nearer to the doors he actually lived behind.

There is one portrait of the family, but it dates from before the corner. It is a group photograph of both parents and their eight children then living, probably taken late in 1899, a year or two before the move²⁵. If the group is the eight children then alive, the card explains the count. Of its eleven, the youngest, Paul, was born only in 1900, and two of the earlier children had died, which would leave exactly eight. The photograph is the family's own, and the family portrait deep dive reads it.

Since then two individual likenesses have turned up in a descendant's online family tree. With the family's permission both are now shown in the family portrait deep dive: a studio portrait of Jacoba Anna Muijser as a young woman, and one of Cees in old age, wearing a bow tie, with a framed portrait of an older man behind him²⁶.