Our family stems from a little village called Tongelre in the Eastern part of the dutch province Brabant, the village is now a part of the city Eindhoven, on the high sandy areas of that province, characterized by sandy soils and small sand hills, called ”duinen” (dunes).
The province of Brabant and the "high sand areas" there, in the red circle is Tongelre
An very old word for ”farm” in dutch is ”hoeve” (pronounced ”hoove”) of ”hof”. So our family name means ”a farm in the dunes”.
A drawing by H. de Laat (1900-1980)
In the eightteenth century Eastern Brabant was characterized by small farms and poverty. Regularly outbursts of cattle-plague (anthrax) thinned out their cattle. At that time nobody knew about contamination, so those plagues were inevitable.
At the same time the linen-industry, and especially linen bleacheries, flourished in the city of Haarlem and surroundings. Some village administrators and bleacheries there had cont(r)acts with villages in Brabant, to find workforce for their bleacheries.
One of our forefathers, Hendrik, born 1733 in Tongelre, is one of many young men "emigrating" from Brabant to the province og Holland.
Probably he collected milk-whey, used in the bleacheries, in the neighborhood and he met in Spaarnwoude Pieternel Heemskerk, the (rich?) widow of Cors Joppe van Warmerdam. They married in 1767, Hendrik was 34 yers old then, and he became a farmer again. In 1784 Pieternel dies, Hendrik inherits the farm, and three months later he marries Marytje Poel, they had three children.
Since that time till the midth of the last century almost all his descendents lived in the near neighbourhood of Spaarnwoude, and almost all were farmers our farmers wives. Now in the Netherlands the descendents are spread all over the country.
As a joke (perhaps a bit more than that) I designed a coat of arms for our family.
The shield is yellow and blue, irregulary separated, symbolizing dunes, in the heart of the shield a farm.
The colours are sand and heaven, but also the colours of the coat of arms of Spaarnwoude (a climbing lion in gold in a blue shield).
Spaarnwoude
The shield is not topped by a crown or a helmet, but by a farmers cap, and supporters are nor two lions, but two rabbits do the job. The rabbit is one of the most frequent animals in the dunes.
The motto is in latin, (if a don't use helmets, crowns or lions, I am allowed to be a bit snobby here) translated "but the farmer he ploughed on", a quote from a dutch poem by J. W. F. Werumeus Buning, callad "The ballad of the Farmer", the first two lines of that poem are (translated to english)
There were three crosses on Golgotha
but the farmer he ploughed on
Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena
but the farmer he ploughed on
Whatever happens on earth, farmers do their job with great, somtimes stubborn, perseverance, and I'm proud of my farmers descent.