The years we cannot fill
Who lived in units 169a, 169b and 169c in each year from 1901 to 1940?
The address-book labels record what the directory printed. They do not prove ownership, and they are not a complete list of residents.
For most of the span we can name the residents. Cornelis Pelt is recorded at the corner from the 1906 volume, at first without a letter. The 1911 street list prints the three-letter split as 169a for G. J. van Duffelen, 169c for Pelt, and 169b for the firm, Van Duffelen & Pelt, rather than a family. The letters were not printed the same way every year, as the 1910 entries below show. The 1920 street list already prints Beens' Woninginrichting at the address, beside the outgoing Van Duffelen & Pelt, with both partners still living there. The founders left afterwards: Pelt for Snellinckstraat 10a on 22 March, the Van Duffelen family for Zeist on 4 May 1921 . Through the 1920s the address book goes on naming the occupants. Two years that once looked blank, 1924 and 1925, we filled from the full street-list page: the digitised index had skipped the block, but the printed book carried it. It shows an office clerk at 169b in 1924 and F. J. Beens at 169a in 1925.
Three more volumes, 1926, 1927 and the combined 1934–35 book, we reached by looking a resident up under his surname instead of the street.
The blanks that remain fall into four kinds, and they need telling apart.
The first kind is the publisher's silence, not the building's. No address book appeared for 1902, 1932 or 1933, or for the three years from 1936 to 1938. The record we hold has no edition for those years, so there is nothing to read. Behind that lies a deeper rule, which the book prints about itself at the foot of the street list.
Two kinds of home are left out, the note warns: the upper flats of weekly-rent dwellings, and weekly-rent dwellings below a set rental value. These are a street's cheapest homes, the kind a low-paid domestic or a weekly tenant would rent, and the directory leaves them out by design. "Not in the book" has never meant "not living there."
The second kind of blank we have already closed by another route, and it no longer counts as a gap. The years 1924 to 1927 above belong here. They were dark in the digitised index and came back from the printed book: the full street page for 1924 and 1925, the surname list for 1926 and 1927.
The third kind is a partial reading. The 1910 name and trade entries place Van Duffelen & Pelt at 169a and G. J. van Duffelen at 169b directly
The fourth kind is the true blank: the edition survives, but its private occupants do not. The combined 1934–35 book records J. A. van Duijn at 169b, yet no private occupant of 169a or 169c has been recovered for those years. Two people in particular stay nameless. A live-in maid advertised from 169b in 1928 is named nowhere in the directory, and only a household card would give her.
And a cabinet-maker named Van Kleef, at work at 169c around 1950, appears without a first name in the sources we hold.
Where the record survives whole, it looks like this: the 1939 street list, with the corner among its lines.
One more thing looks like a fifth resident and is not. An 1911 advertisement by a widowed charwoman gave her contact address as "Rochussenstraat 169." She was not at the corner. The notice ran in a Hague paper among Hague addresses, and the street it names is The Hague's own Rochussenstraat, in the Schilderswijk. We do not put a name to her, and we do not claim her for this building.
What would fill the true blanks is specific. The 1928 maid needs her household card, which is not indexed by address and must be found another way. The Van Kleef occupant needs a personal card from the family-history centre, which has to be ordered and paid for. One gap no archive will fill. Nobody who remembers the building has yet been recorded, and that is the most urgent absence of all, because a document waits and a memory does not.