The van Duijns of Rochussenstraat 169

Most of what we know about the family behind the shop comes from one kind of document, and most of that from a single day. Johan Andries van Duijn died in January 1978. His widow placed a notice, a son placed one for the firm in the NRC, and the firm's assembled staff placed another¹; between them they recorded a family list and the firm's loss². This register is built on those notices. The proven kin links sit in the relationships register, and the prose here explains what the notices say and what they leave out.

The notice

The founder died on 10 January 1978, aged ninety-three³, in the Rotterdam care home de Schans, where his widow would die less than two months later⁴. The NRC of 16 January carried more than one notice for him. The shortest is his son's, for the firm, announcing het plotseling overlijden, the sudden death, of his father. It names no one still living:

The family's own notice, signed by his widow, lists van Duijn and related names, among them a van Duijn married into the Feenstra family, and ends with klein- en achterkleinkinderen, grand- and great-grandchildren, unnamed⁵. It leaves some of the relationships in that list unsettled. Because it prints living people, with survivors, the towns they lived in and an address, we read it for what it says but do not reproduce it. No initials are attached to towns here, and anyone the record does not itself place as dead is treated as possibly living and left unnamed.

The household moved to Rochussenstraat 169b on 8 December 1931, from no. 171, where the family card has it from 10 December 1929⁶. The 1932 telephone directory, a separate source, probably lists Johan Andries van Duyn as a director of the Furnishco/Continental firm at 169, and gives a director's residence at 171⁷. That printed address, no. 171, is the household's earlier address on the family card, not the 169b it had left for in December 1931, and the records do not show why the listing still carried it. Nor does the directory establish a legal succession from that firm to his later business.

How to read it

One detail matters for reading the notice. The widow signed as B. A. van Duijn-Metz. The firm's notice on the same page carried the signature of another B. A. van Duijn, who called the founder his father and ran Fa. J. A. van Duyn until it closed in 1987. The register therefore keeps the two printed B. A. van Duijns apart⁸. Bernardina Arnolda Metz was the founder's second wife. Three sons from his first marriage, to Neeltje Paul, are documented separately⁹, and the notice does not say which marriage the people it lists belong to¹⁰.

Some of these people first appear in this dossier through the notice. One is a van Duijn married into the Feenstra family, daughter or daughter-in-law; the notice does not say which. Another is a son's wife, listed under her own maiden name¹¹. Behind the list lie the sons' own marriages, where the descendant lines begin. The first marriage, to Neeltje Paul, gave the founder three sons: Bastiaan Cornelis, born 1910; Cornelis Johan, 1911 to 1967; and Johan Andries junior, 1912 to 1954¹². Bastiaan Cornelis, an agricultural engineer trained at Wageningen, married at Rotterdam in February 1936, with his brother Cornelis Johan as a witness¹³. Cornelis Johan married Wilhelmina Christina Justema on 3 March 1937. A court dissolved that marriage by a decree registered in January 1943, and he married again that March¹⁴. Two of these marriages had wives whom the 1978 notice still counted among the living, and they are left unnamed here.

The same acts date something the firm's own story leaves open: when the founder went into trade. At his wedding in 1909 and at his youngest son's birth in 1912 he still called himself an office clerk, a kantoorklerk or kantoorbediende¹⁵. By his sons' marriage acts of 1936 and 1937 he appears plainly as koopman, a merchant, and those acts also record that Neeltje Paul, the sons' mother, had already died¹⁶.

Cornelis Johan van Duijn's marriage act of 1937 enters his father as koopman, and a note in red ink in the margin records the 1943 divorce¹⁷.

The youngest son's birth is the one the founder declared and signed himself. The boy, also named Johan Andries, was born to the founder's wife Neeltje Paul on 22 December 1912 at Sophiakade 40a¹⁸. The founder registered the birth the next day, giving his own age as twenty-seven and, in his own declaration, his calling as kantoorbediende, an office clerk¹⁹.

The limits

The register stops where the notices and the indexes stop. It gives no living person's address or private circumstances, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren whom the notice gathered under one phrase stay under it here. The founder's parents, by contrast, are certain. He was the son of Bastiaan van Duijn and Alida Jongeneel, named in his own birth act of 1885 and again in his marriage act of 1909²⁰.

The birth act, drawn up at Bergschenhoek in January 1885, takes the family's trade back a generation. His father, Bastiaan van Duijn, is entered as a bakker, a baker, and declared the birth of a son to be named Johan Andries²¹.

The marriage act of 1909 repeats both parents' names and adds what the birth act could not. The father, still a broodbakker, was at the wedding; the mother, Alida Jongeneel, had died, and the act enters her as overleden²².

Two older readings, from before the shop, are probable rather than proven, because each rests on a family-notice index alone. The first is the parents' own marriage in May 1882, which a family index fiches twice, with details that do not fully agree²³. The second concerns the founder's wife: Neeltje Paul is probably the person an index places in a Rotterdam family notice of December 1918, cross-referenced to the van Duijn name, though the entry gives no more than that²⁴.