Recorded relationships

Each row in this register joins two entries and says what linked them. It may be a marriage, a parent and child, a pair of siblings or a line of descent. It may be the founding of a firm, a seat on its board or a share among its owners, a job on its staff, or one business succeeding or merging into another. And it may be the plainest tie a building can have: the years a firm occupied the corner. The rows draw on several kinds of record. There are the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths, the deed notices firms published in the Staatscourant, their advertisements in the press, and the city's household cards and address books. Together they answer a question the narrative can only take a piece at a time: how is this person connected to that one?

Before reading down the list, look at the status each tie carries. Confirmed means the project has accepted the relationship at that level; probable marks a tie that is less secure. The labels do not replace the citations underneath. Some rows still lack a direct fact, source or evidence pointer. So the register is a curated index with uneven support, not forty-five equally documented proofs.

The ties that fasten a firm to this building need a word too. Each covers the years a business is recorded at the corner. The end date may be the last year the records trace it there, or a reasoned end, rather than a documented day of departure. Where an arrival is disputed, the tie starts in the earliest year the records prove the firm itself in occupation. A private notice that puts the name at the same address earlier does not count.

The register is also no complete family tree or company chart. It holds accepted and probable working links, and it is not exhaustive. One probable board-role row still has no captured source, and other rows have no direct fact or evidence link. If a connection is missing from the table, that does not mean it never existed.

A Rotterdam household card, a gezinskaart, shows how several of the family ties were established. It sets a column of names against a column giving each person's relation to the head of the household.

This card belongs to the household of Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen, one of the two cabinet-makers for whose account the works were built¹. It lists his wife, Hendrika Mathlener, their five daughters and, at the foot, the son Gerrit, entered as kunstschilder, a painter². A single sheet like this records a whole family's ties at once. On the back, the same cards carry each family's addresses and removals, and those feed the residents' register.