1900 – 1978

These detailed memoirs of Harm van der Laan served as the basis for a book detailing the family’s history till 1955.

This book, “The van der Laan Venture”, has become a valuable fixture within the van der Laan clan — a coffee-table-quality, 85 page book that was distributed at our 2019 reunion and helped set the stage for our 2023 heritage-revisiting reunion in Stadskanaal, Netherlands. It has been available in PDF format for a while, but here I have pulled my Opa’s story out of the mix and set it apart in mobile-readable format.

Other parts of the book, by Uncle Harry and Oma Dina have now also been given their own spaces and broadened to include the full texts of their memoirs.

Henry de Jong, February 2025

Preface to “The van der Laan Venture”, 2019

It has been a privilege for me to delve deeply into the lives of ‘Opa and Oma’ van der Laan, while editing and assembling the various writings and photos in this book. From where I stand, at the border between two generations, I am keen to connect with my past.

Stiny de Jong also set her sights on a full story, but never got past her own childhood. Only Harry van der Laan matched his father with his delightful take on the years 1936 – 1955. His story was written for Rika and Grant and the occasion of their wedding in 2009, and clearly inspired Stiny, just days later, to begin setting down her own thoughts.

You could say that this book was kick-started by Harm and Dina’s nephew, Henk Bousema. On the occasion of Berend Beekhuis’ 90th birthday (November 19, 2008), Henk presented Berend with a manuscript entitled “Stories of the Beekhuis family,” one of which was Harm van der Laan’s, still in Dutch, but now with a type face.

By then, Henk Bousema had long been working on much larger projects, genealogies of both the Beekhuis and the Stuit families. “Stuit: a family history” (324 pages) had been published in 1996. In 2010 he published the “Genealogy of Adolf HindriksBeekhuis” (526 pages). Copies of these works can be found on some Vander Laan family bookshelves.

In the last years of Dina van der Laan’s life, no doubt after going through her personal possessions, Stiny de Jong gathered up Stuit family (Dina’s mother’s family) correspondence from the years 1908 – 1912, translated them and published them in a small, 28 page booklet titled simply, “Elizabeth.” She distributed copies in June of 1994. These letters give a remarkably intimate and sobering taste of life and death during the years when Harm and Dina were still youths. Especially poignant is the Stuit family’s experience with emigration (to America), one that must have informed Harm and Dina in their own deliberations fifty years later.

Stiny was generally thorough in gathering up material for the family archives. Her two binders of captioned photos, announcements and documents, news clippings, correspondence and manuscripts are a valua-ble resource. Also in her possession were books of more general interest; one detailing the liberation of Blijham and Wedderveer and a 75th Anniversary book about the history of Blijham’s Christian school.

Such a rich, historical record bespeaks a rich history, one that will always be worth exploring. For those who knew ‘Opa and Oma’, they are a remarkable pivot point between 1920 and 2020, a century of change so radical as to make life barely recognizable looking from one end to the other, either way. The stories in this book will help to bridge that gap.

Henry James de Jong, St. Catharines, Ontario, June, 2019