The TRC recently acquired a small, linen and cotton sampler (TRC 2023.0185), 31 x 31 cm in size, which mentions the name of D.W. Kolman, aged 9, and the year 1867. The sampler came as part of a larger collection of textiles that were donated by a member of the Dekker family. She also kindly gave us some background infomation about the collection.
A Dutch sampler worked by D.W. Kolman aged nine, in 1867 (TRC 2023.0185).
Most of the items, including the sampler, had belonged to the grandmother of the donor's husband. That was Henriette Dekker-Schuit, who was born in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in 1886 and returned to the Netherlands with her husband and children around 1932. She died in The Hague in 1965. But what was her link to D.W. Kolman, aged 9 in 1867?
Davina Wilhelmina de Kloet - Kolman (1858-1937).Fortunately, Kolman is not a common Dutch name, and I quickly identified someone called Davina Wilhelmina Kolman (or Kollman), who was born on 16 May 1858 at Kortenhoef (near Hilversum, southeast of Amsterdam) to Hendrik Kolman and Johanna Voorn.
She would have been nine years old in 1867, and we may safely conclude that she was the one who worked the sampler. But we still do not know how her sampler ended up in the TRC Collection.
On 5 June 1880, Davina Kolman married a farmer named Jacobus de Kloet, also from Kortenhoef. Is it a coincidence that his father (although not married to his mother), who was called Elias Cornelisz Puttenaar (1791-1871), had been baptised on 2 June 1791 in the Pieterskerk, right in the centre of the old town of Leiden, the domicile of the TRC? Davina, the sampler embroideress, therefore had a tenuous link with Leiden!
Davina and Jacobus had many children, who were all born in Kortenhoef. Jacobus died in 1928, and Davina in 1937.
Jacobus de Kloet, 1856-1928.None of the children married a person with the surname Dekker, so we still do not know how the sampler, worked by their mother Davina ended up in the Dekker family.
However, there is more information: on 21 June 1911 the eldest daughter – Jacoba Davina de Kloet (born in 1880/1881, she died in 1964) – married the painter Bernardus Antonie van Beek (1875-1941). This artist used to come to Kortenhoef to paint, and he settled there permanently in 1911. Jacoba de Kloet is not mentioned, but we may assume she was the reason why he came to live there.
And now we are getting close. One of their daughters was Davina Wilhelmina (Ina) van Beek (1916-2008). It so happens that Ina van Beek was the partner of Jeanette Dekker (born in Indonesia on 7 February 1925), who was the daughter of Henriette Dekker-Schuit (whose grandson married the woman who donated the sampler to the TRC).
That means we can now trace the sampler from the maker right through to the TRC: we may presume that the sampler, worked by Davina Wilhelmina Kolman (1858-1937) in 1867, was passed on her eldest daughter Jacoba Davina van Beek-de Kloet (1880/1-1964). From her the sampler went to her daughter Davina Wilhelmina (Ina) van Beek (1916-2008), and then to Ina’s partner Jeanette Dekker (b. 1925), and hence it was passed on to the Dekker family and to Jeanette’s nephews and nieces, and ultimately to the TRC.
Medieval church of Kortenhoef, with the cemetery.It is interesting to note that the parents of Davina who worked the original sampler, must have been poor: at the time of their wedding, her father was a labourer and her mother a housemaid. Yet this is a nicely worked sampler that required skills to produce. It seems Davina received more than the bare minimum of needlework teaching.
The explanation may be that she seems to have been her parents’ only surviving child: I found only one brother, Abraham, who died in 1862 at the age of ten months. They may have been willing to pay, in order to give their daughter the best schooling they could – and they may have been able to do so because she was the only surviving child. Of course, the nineteenth century was also big on charity and private initiative. It is quite possible that Kortenhoef had a good school for poor children, or some private charity teaching needlework.
Nelleke Ganzevoort, 18 February 2023
