Forward by Henry de Jong (Henry van Herman van Hinne)
I imagine a great number of memoirs are written by elderly people at the encouragement of their children, and that my two grandfathers are among them. My primary source for Hendrik de Jong’s memoirs is a hundred page, single spaced, photocopied, 8 1/2 x 11, bound book, of which I imagine there will still be a few copies. It is in Dutch, and I assume that my father typed it out from his dad’s handwritten pages, produced a number of books and distributed them to his five siblings, perhaps even to his mother.
Bringing this work into cyberspace remains but an intention of mine. It should be out there in Dutch and English, I think, but I have no digital file to work from, so it might be a while yet.
What I do have now, however, is a subset of this — eighteen, digital (Word Perfect) chapter files comprising a book for which I have no hard copy. This one, I think, Herman selected from the opening chapters of the larger text, rearranged a bit and presented as a contribution to Terschelling lore. It was actually published with a larger audience in mind, and appears to have been sent out by (real) mail to Dutch relatives and some institutions. If anyone has a copy of this, I’d love to see it.
So, it is this compilation by Herman de Jong of Hendrik (and brother Pieter) de Jong’s writing, along with his own prelude and postlude, that I have here. And the English translation is already on tap for a future unveiling.
Henry de Jong, February 2025
Generations
~ three generations (b. 1896, 1932, 1956) ~
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