There ís a place like home

If you look at the lyrics of this "bird song" you can do nothing but conclude that if ever a text was confusing, it is this one. It says that there is no place like home but everyone reads it as that there is such a place. Well, beats me, language is a complicated thing. Or is our brain fooling us? In any case, this is going to be the fourth and last post showing the homes where I live(d). If you want to see the previous ones, please look here for number one, two and three.
Post #3 ended with our house on the Rembrandtweg in Amstelveen. We moved to the southern part of the same village on February 1, 1988. There we bought half of a socalled 'two-under-one-roof'. 

32 De Zon, Amstelveen

We lived there very happily for a little over 20 years. In case you want to see the inside and the garden, please see the very first blog I ever wrote, in 2008. That was when we wanted to sell the house. Unfortunately the asking price that you see there is not the price for which it was sold eventually. 
Already for a number of years it was our intention to move to a quieter part of the country, preferably near the beach. So in 2007 we found a condo in Castricum, just 3 miles from the coast line. We moved there on November 17, 2008.

Triade, Castricum

We live in the red apartment building just below the center of the picture. Ours has an impressive 270 degrees view from almost the east to the north. On a clear day we can see the cranes in the Amsterdam Africa docks in the south east and Krommenie in the east. And on a not so clear day the steel mill (formerly known as the Hoogovens) in Velzen (south west) as well. Castricum is a lot smaller than Amstelveen. It has some 20,000 inhabitants. In case you are wondering whether such a small village has all the facilities one needs, there is a home for elderly people to the north of our apartment complex and a cemetery immediately adjacent to us. What more can two retired people want?

To be  continued with the houses my wife lived in before we got married.

Both photo's made by myself on Jun. 2, 2008 and Apr. 27, 2012 resp.

Another home page

In the first post on this subject, Home! Sweet Home!, I told you about my motivation to show all the houses I ever lived in. In short, if I don't record my personal history my great great grandchildren certainly can't find it. The last house I told you about in the second post, was the one in The Hague-Loosduinen. It was also the last house where I lived before I got married. After our wedding party we moved to the neighboring city of Rijswijk, to the house where our son was born in 1967. Rijswijk is also the city where my mother was born. So you could say it was kind of coming home again. We lived there from October 29, 1965 to some time in June 1967.

526 Huis te Landelaan, Rijswijk (ZH)

It is the apartment on the first floor, right in the middle of the picture. It has the brown planters. Shortly before we moved there, I joined KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in The Hague. But some time in 1966 they moved their HQ from the Plesmanweg to Schiphol Airport. So we started looking for a house in that vicinity. But before going there we spent a few months in the house of my parents-in-law in Loosduinen. That was from June to August 15, 1967.

88 Pisuissestraat, Den Haag-Loosduinen

This street is also pictured in the previous post. But I took this picture almost 50 years later, the changes are evident. 

372 Rembrandtweg, Amstelveen

On August 15, 1967 we moved to Amstelveen situated just a few miles east of Schiphol. KLM was very instrumental in finding this house. It was a socalled maisonnette consisting of two floors. The lower floor (with the purple windows) was situated on the corner, right above the red car. Our daughter was born there in 1970. We lived there very happily until February 1, 1988 when we bought a house elsewhere in Amstelveen. That made this house the last one we rented. And in the beginning in 1967 it was not a cheap house. I remember that the rent amounted to over 35% of my salary then. But that was Amstelveen for you. Its image then was that of a very prosperous village, the cause probably being the circumstance that KLM pilots were all living there. But by that time that was already history. However, while the crews had moved elsewhere, the price levels were there to stay...

To  be continued

Photo dates
Huis te Landelaan, Sep. 5, 2011
Pisuissestraat, Aug. 24, 2011
Rembrandtweg, Sep. 10, 2011

More homely houses

Houses damaged by the 1953 flood

Last week I started this series about all the houses I ever lived in. It started with the house where I was born in 1944. The last one shown then, in fact it was number 6, brought us to 1953. That was the year large parts of southwest Netherlands were flooded. As a consequence thereof close to 2,000 people died during the night of February 1, 1953. During the morning of that very same day my mother told me that I would be living with a family in a place called Huizen. It is situated on the borders of the IJsselmeer in the middle of the country. 

133 Nieuw Bussumerweg, Huizen

I lived there for about a year from August 1953 to September 1954. It was a fairly large house but so was the G. family living there. It consisted of 4 boys, 3 girls and their parents of course. I remember I had a great time there but after a year my stay came to an end.

46 Mimosastraat, Den Haag

We are still talking about the period less than ten years after WW2. The housing situation in Holland was such that it was quite common for two families to share a single house. And for us this situation was no different. So my mother obtained a floor in a house owned by acquaintances, Mr. and Mrs.  Van W-D. van L. The house was situated in the part of The Hague called Bohemen. It was just a ten minute bike ride away from coastal Kijkduin where my father and grandparents lived before the war. The Mimosastraat house was our residence between September 1954 and early 1958. It is the house in the middle with the two lamps switched on. We lived on the second floor.

10 Tramstraat, Den Haag-Loosduinen

And then finally, 13 years after the war, my mother managed to get a house all to herself and to her two sons. Again this house was very close to Kijkduin and the North Sea beach. It was situated in the former village of Loosduinen, now part of The Hague. We lived in the house with the white curtains on the second floor from early 1958 until September 1963.
For me this was a very happy move because here I met the girl who is still my wife today. That memorable event took place during the first half of 1959. 

124 Pisuissestraat, Den Haag-Loosduinen

In 1963 new apartments were built just around the corner from where we lived. This opportunity was too good to be true, a new house with an acceptable rent! So we moved again. Our house is in the block to the very left and just out of sight. I lived there until the day I married on October 29, 1965. Until that same date my future bride lived  in the block that is pictured so prominently here. Her parents lived on the first floor to the very right. Together we moved to the neighboring city of Rijswijk.

To be continued

Photo credits
'Damaged houses' taken from Wikipedia
'Pisuissestraat' has been scanned from a picture postcard I have
The color pictures have been taken by myself on April 11, 2012, Jan. 18, 2012 and Feb. 22, 2007 resp.

Home! Sweet Home!

Digging in the past may be regarded as the genealogist's core business. The older the document or the source, the better. But generally genealogists tend to forget that recording contemporary data is equally important. If you want to enable your great grandson to find out all kinds of interesting details about his great grandparents, you have to enable him to do so. In other words we have to write down our own, contemporary history. And history not only consists of stories, also material objects such as cars and houses are part of that. Therefore, in this blog I have already paid attention to e.g. the aircraft types I flew in during my professional life and the cars we owned as a family. Now I like to highlight the houses that we lived in. I'll start with my birth home and after having completed all the houses (my wife and) I lived in, there will be posts showing my wife's domiciles.
OK, here we go, back to The Hague in 1944.

661 Laan van Meerdervoort, The Hague

During WW2 there was a maternity hospital in this house. It was named Huize Margaretha (Margaretha's home). According to stories of my mother it was not a paragon of hygiene. I stayed there from Jan. 25 to approx Feb. 5, 1944. Shortly after I developed chicken-pox, a desease you are only entitled to when you are at least about 1,5-2 years old.

18 Mispelstraat, The Hague

After 10 days or so I moved to the nearby house of my grandparents. Although my father and mother lived in Apeldoorn at the time, my mother decided to have me in The Hague. We stayed there from approx Feb. 5 until some time after Mar. 26, 1944. Number 18 is the house with the horizontal brace drawn underneath it. The handwriting is my grandmother's.

6 Parkweg, Apeldoorn
The Parkweg is currently named Prof. Röntgenstraat

My father was a civil servant working for the Home Office. Earlier during the war the Germans ordered this government body, together with the Ministry of Justice, to be transferred from The Hague to Apeldoorn in the eastern part of the country. We lived in the house of two elderly ladies named Bakker. My stay there lasted from some time after Mar. 26, 1944 to the end of June 1945 when my mother and I moved back to The Hague.

18 Mispelstraat, The Hague

As a consequence of the war there was a large shortage of houses. So initially there was hardly any other possibility but to live with my grandparents again. Taking into consideration the circumstances I am sure that they did not mind this at all, to the contrary! We lived there from June 1945 until sometime prior to Sep. 27, 1946 when we were assigned a house in the Goudreinetstraat.

614 Goudreinetstraat, The Hague

Our house was the second ground floor house from the left, just after the portico. For reasons unknown to me, we went back to my grandparents house in the Mispelstraat around August 1949. So we stayed there close to 3 years. The Goudreinetstraat house was then taken by my father's sister and her family. They lived in with my grandparents from Sep. 27, 1946 until approx 1,5 year later. No doubt all this moving back and forth had to do with difficult housing situation at the time.

18 Mispelstraat, The Hague (green front door)

This time I spent some 4 years on this address, the house of my grandparents. I remember my grandmother telling us that they bought this house prior to WW2 for the impressive sum of 5,000 Dutch Guilders. Converted to euro's that was approx € 2,250 then and some € 46,000 today. Measured by today's standards, that was a cheap house. Current prices for similar houses in that part of The Hague are in the range of € 300,000. Speaking of a bubble...

To be continued

Photo credits
Home Sweet Home www.pandurohobby.de
Laan van Meerdervoort Google
Mispelstraat (1): blogger collection
Parkweg: blogger picture Sep. 23, 2011
Mispelstraat (2) Beeldbank, Den Haag
Goudreinetstraat Beeldbank, Den Haag
Mispelstraat (3) Google