The partner whose later life is in Apeldoorn
The 1909 notice renewing Van Duffelen & Pelt carries three names. Two belong to the cabinet-makers who had built the works; the third belongs to a young man of twenty-one whom the notice does not call a furniture maker. August Frans Antoon Maria Wille came in as a partner at that renewal, for a term running from the first of June.
Bij akte, op 12 Juni 1909 voor den te Rotterdam resideerenden notaris Willem van Traa gepasseerd, is tusschen de heeren Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen, meubelfabrikant, Cornelis Pelt, meubelfabrikant, en August Frans Antoon Maria Wille, particulier, allen wonende te Rotterdam, aangegaan eene vennootschap onder de firma van Duffelen en Pelt
The two founders appear on the notice as furniture manufacturers. Wille appears as a particulier, a man of private means, and the notice says nothing more about his contribution or his role; it does not say whether he knew the trade. The 1909 deed itself is lost. The one document that still names all three men is this printed Staatscourant notice, set out in . The rest of this page asks who he was and where he went.
We hold no likeness of Wille. His life has to be pieced together from civil acts, register cards and columns of print: an Amsterdam birth, a Rotterdam marriage, a departure, and a second wife the early records never mention.
An Amsterdam man of private means
Wille was born in Amsterdam on 26 September 1887, of German-Catholic descent; his mother was born in Aachen. That descent is the one part of his origins the records fix firmly. Otherwise he enters the corner's story already grown, at twenty-one and described as a man of private means.
A Rotterdam family
When he married in Rotterdam on 24 September 1913, the marriage act no longer called him a man of private means but a meubelfabrikant, a furniture manufacturer. He had been a partner in the firm for four years by then; the records do not say what changed in his role.
His bride was Helena Antonia von der Möhlen, and their Rotterdam household lasted through his years as a partner. Daughters were born to them in the city, among them Carolina Maria in 1916 and Johanna Louise in 1918.
Later life in Apeldoorn
By circa 1919 or 1920 later records place him in Apeldoorn, in the east of the country, alongside a furniture venture trading as A. H. Overdulve en Co.. Little of that venture survives in the dossier beyond its name. Whether the move ended his Rotterdam partnership, or whether the venture prompted it, the records we have do not say. His Apeldoorn life is known in outline; how and when he left the partnership is not established.
A figure in Catholic Apeldoorn
The local press suggests he probably became a man of some standing in the town's Catholic life. The trail here is thinner than in Rotterdam. He most likely stood on the Roman Catholic list in the council elections of 1927 and again in 1935.
In May 1942 he most likely put two properties up for auction before a notary. One was his own villa at Bas Backerlaan 1, with its shed and garden; the other a warehouse or factory at Mariastraat 76. The printed figures are opening bids, not sale prices, and nothing in the notice links the warehouse to the furniture trade.
The second wife
He died at Apeldoorn on 21 March 1965, aged seventy-seven, at the same Bas Backerlaan address. Three days later, after a sung requiem in the town's Catholic church, he was buried.
The death notice is signed, in the name of all, by J. Wille-Wijnker. Wijnker is not von der Möhlen, the woman he had married in Rotterdam in 1913 and who had borne his daughters.
He had married twice. His civil death act gives both wives: Jacoba Wijnker as his widow, and Helena Antonia von der Möhlen as the wife he had formerly been married to.