Both parents, all eight children

For a long time the Pelts' faces were held back, and the founding families of the corner left few faces the site can show. That has changed. Murk Arend Eland, a Pelt descendant and the family's own keeper, has cleared the set for publication, so pictures that could once only be described can now be shown, each under the family's credit. There is a group photograph, an annotated key to it and a cut-out portrait of the founder taken from the same frame. Two further likenesses came by a separate route, recovered from a public genealogy tree.

One picture was never held back at all, because it is not a family photograph. It shows the carved commemorative stone still set in the corner's wall, photographed by the owner in 2026.

This is the stone as it is today, in a present-day photograph by the owner. In the names of the founders' children, it records that the first stone of Rochussenstraat 169 was laid on 3 June 1899 by Gerrit van Duffelen, aged nine, and Cornelis Pelt, aged six¹. The nine-year-old grew up to be the painter Gerrit van Duffelen. The six-year-old is the boy the family names in the group photograph, though the picture cannot settle which of the two sailor-suited boys he is.

The photograph

Both parents and all eight of the then-living children are ranged on a wooden veranda or stair against a photographer's painted ground. The father, Cornelis Pelt, stands at the top right. Beside him a seated woman holds the baby, and a young woman sits at the far right beside a table. The two boys in sailor suits sit to the left and in the centre. Among the four girls, one stands at the left holding a doll, one sits in the centre in a white blouse and dark pinafore, one stands at the back, left of centre, in dark clothes, and one stands in the middle in a belted patterned dress. Toys lie about the floor: a doll, a toy wheelbarrow, a pull-along dog. The table is covered with a cloth and the balustrade is turned, all the studio warmth of a family portrait. The backdrop, painted windows and brick hung with drapes, looks studio-made, so the picture may have been taken at a photographer's rather than at the family's home.

A numbered key sits beside the print, so the group can be read marker by marker instead of guessed at.

The key numbers ten figures: the two parents (1 and 2) and the eight children (3 to 10). Set against the family's roster from the civil records, it can be walked figure by figure. Only two of the placings are the family's own testimony. Number 1, standing at the top right with arms crossed, is the father, Cornelis Pelt, born 1856, the one face that matches the cut-out portrait below. Numbers 5 and 6, the two boys in matching sailor suits, are the twins Cees and Jan Hendrik, born November 1892. The family names one of them as Cees, though the picture cannot tell which of the pair he is.

The rest is inferred identification, reasoned from the roster and the figures' apparent ages, not written on the print.

The key once carried an eleventh mark, set aside below: at full resolution it is not a person.

The date comes from counting, not guessing. No date is written on the print, and the date that came with the picture was about 1901 or 1902. Counting the children instead puts it most probably about the end of 1899². The couple had eleven children in all. Two died in infancy, Cornelis in 1888 and Frans in 1894, and nine survived. The photograph shows exactly the eight who were alive in the narrow window between Willem Johan's birth in 1898 and Paul's in 1900. Paul is not in the group, and there is no three-year-old, which Willem Johan would have to be under the later date. The 1901–02 date the picture arrived with is therefore not merely revised: it does not fit the children pictured. At the end of 1899 the family still lived in the Crooswijk quarter, at Erasmusstraat 31, and would not move into Rochussenstraat 169c until about 1901³. A late-1899 portrait therefore predates the family's move to the corner, though the studio backdrop means it need not have been taken at any of their homes.

The family confirms the identifications, not the date. It names the father, Cornelis Pelt, and one of the two sailor-suited boys as Cees, the six-year-old who had just laid the building's first stone with the young Gerrit van Duffelen. These identifications are testimony, not a caption on the print, and are best held as probable. The boys hold a particular trap. Cees was a twin, born with his brother Jan Hendrik in November 1892, so the two sailor suits are the one same-age pair among all the children. That is why the pair is family-confirmed but the individual boy is not.

One figure looked for is not there. A shape at the far upper left, behind the railing and well to the left of the girl at the back, was once read as a possible eleventh person. At full resolution it turns out to be an ornate side-table carrying a statuette, and the earlier reading has been corrected.

The faces, close

From the same photograph the family keeper has drawn out one face on its own: the father, Cornelis Pelt, one of the two men who built the corner and a man this project could otherwise put no face to.

Two more likenesses came from a different source. They were recovered from a public family tree on Geneanet, at that platform's small public size, and are shown here courtesy of the Pelt family via Geneanet. The first shows Cornelis 'Cees' Pelt in old age: the six-year-old of the foundation stone, now an elderly man in a bow tie. Behind his shoulder stands a framed portrait of an older man, too coarse at this size to identify, and no name is put to it.

The second is Jacoba Anna Muijser, Cornelis Pelt's wife and mother of the eleven children, as a young woman in a dark high-necked dress. Until now she appeared only within the group, never alone.

Restored and colourised copies of the group photograph also exist, kept as working copies and not shown here; the master print above is the one to read. The Pelt household card sets out the household these people kept at the corner, and the Pelt descendants register follows the line forward from them.