By Jim Pinkham
For the Times-Villager
For Russ and Myra Dercks, the trip of a lifetime began with an e-mail last spring from Myra’s second cousin and his wife in Ottawa, the Canadian capital.
They said: “We’re going to Holland in the fall. We’d like to have you come with us. Are you interested?’ ” Myra recalls.
At first, this Little Chute couple in their 70s, placidly wintering in Florida when the e-mail arrived, thought they weren’t.
Eventually, though, the lure was too strong. Myra, one of 14 children, has a fervent interest in her family’s roots, but it’s one that came late in life. She began to wonder what made her grandfather, Henry Van Zeeland, who already had six children at the time, pull up stakes from his home in Gemert, the Netherlands, and head to America to become the patriarch of the Wisconsin Van Zeelands.
“By the time I got interested, there was nobody left to ask,” Myra explains ruefully.
Mary Kalupa, of Kaukauna, another Van Zeeland by birth, helped Myra start on the quest half a dozen years ago by sharing the information she had acquired on the family tree.
Van Zeeland ‘every which way’
About the same time, a month after Myra first ventured onto the Internet, she found a second cousin, John Van Zeeland, who lived in Ottawa. It turned out that Myra and John’s grandfathers were brothers and that John himself had lived in Gemert until 1960, when at age 26, he emigrated to Canada.
It was a connection born of persistence: “I just kept typing on the Internet ‘Van Zeeland’ every which way to find somebody that could tell me about Gemert,” Myra recalls.
Myra stumbled upon the resume of John’s daughter, then looking for work, and explained she had no job to offer but would appreciate some help with the quest. The reply came back immediately that John had been looking for the Wisconsin Van Zeelands.
It wasn’t long before John and his wife, Diane, came to Little Chute for a week to visit.
 “We hit it off right away,” says Myra. “It was just like, well, having family.”
In fact, an impromptu family reunion ensued during the visit when the Derckses took the Van Zeelands to dinner at Jacks or Better and 40 relatives showed up to greet with them with just a brief word-of-mouth notice in advance.
Connections old and new
The friendship has continued over the years. John gave Myra a genealogical treasure trove — a copy, mostly translated into English, of a family book that traces the Van Zeelands through 11 generations and back into the 1400s.
For John, who has three sisters still living in Gemert, the odyssey there was a chance to renew old ties. And it was natural to invite the Derckses, who had never been, to accompany them.
The adventure began when Russ and Myra loaded up the car Sept. 16 and drove to Ottawa. After a few days of visiting and final preparations, the two couples drove to Montreal on Sept. 20 and caught a flight to Brussels, where they toured the next day before heading to Gemert on Sept. 22.
The next two weeks, until their Oct. 4 departure, wove a rich tapestry of memories — including a chance for Russ, with some advance logistical help from Times-Villager correspondent Jeroen Ketelaars, to locate and visit the tiny Dutch enclave of Zyfflich, just over the German border. There they found the place where Russ’ grandfather had lived before coming to Little Chute with Father Vandenbroek.
Transoceanic saloonkeeper
Leafing through Myra’s scrapbook of the trip awakens dozens of scenes she’ll never forget. The base of operations was Gemert, the village of Grandfather Van Zeeland. There they saw the church where Myra’s grandparents had married, and the site where Henry had kept saloon in the city square. It proved to be a transoceanic occupation: He plied the same trade in Kimberly, and the first seven of Myra’s 13 siblings were born in the boardinghouse above his saloon in the Van Zeeland Building.
In Gemert, three third cousins came calling, including Ad Otten, the city archivist, whom Myra met online two years ago, during one of her online forays. While in town, “Any information that I wanted, he got for me,” Myra says, gratefully.
The cousins presented Myra with a new Dutch copy of the family book tracing the Van Zeeland lineage, which Ad Otten and Adrianus Van Zeeland had co-authored.
A mysterious paternal portrait
One afternoon Otten took the couples on a walking tour of Gemert, where they passed a home continuously inhabited by Van Zeelands for more than 400 years — and where later they would experience the most mysterious moment of their trip. The current occupant, Adrian Van Zeeland, heard his North American relatives were in town and called imploring them to visit. And so they stopped by on their last morning in Gemert.
“He had my father’s picture and he knew all about my father,” Myra recalls, a remarkable fact given that her father had never been to Holland, but the picture had her father’s handwriting on the back, and she estimates that since her father was just a lad in the photo it had to be at least 120 years old.
To this day, however, Myra doesn’t know how Adrian came by the picture or knew of her father. A cancer survivor, Adrian had a house call from his doctor while his guests were there, and they had to leave before he could supply answers.
Other images endure, too, including the visit to Maria Magdalena Chapel, a church that a Van Zeeland ancestor built and funded in perpetuity. The day trip to Amsterdam, where they saw the Anne Frank House, sailed the canals, stumbled twice through the outskirts of the infamous Red Light District, and returned for a midnight enactment of what had become a ritual nightcap at the home of their hosts, Harry and Gerta Donkers.
Barbecue bash and 80th birthday
Their hosts created many memorable moments. Harry’s first wife was John Van Zeeland’s deceased older sister, but despite the seemingly slender connection, the hospitality was rich. The two families had only planned to spend a week at the Donkers, but shortly into the visit their hosts said moving would be too much hassle and invited them to stay for the duration.
The Donkers threw a big Van Zeeland family barbecue bash their first Saturday in town. Harry’s seven kids were on hand, as were John Van Zeeland’s three sisters, and a plethora of children and grandchildren. Special family times also included a Sunday Mass, arranged by John’s sister, Annie, for their mother and later a party to celebrate Annie turning 80.
Throughout the trip, there were calls and drop-ins and parties as word of the visitors got out. The evening of Annie’s birthday also boasted a visit to Leo Van Zeeland, another cousin that Myra tracked down about a year ago during her online trekking. (All the cousins traced their forebears back to Henry Van Zeeland and his brothers, but the ongoing genealogical research has reconnected some branches of the family that had lost touch with each other.)
Their last Sunday in town, Oct. 2, was the annual Schut Sunday, which derives from a much ballyhooed and time-encrusted shooting competition that participants enjoy by invitation only. The person firing the last, decisive shot in the competition becomes king of the Schut for the next year and his wife, the queen. Harry and Gerta, king and queen for the second time, led a march to the chapel, some special rituals during the Mass, a flag ceremony, a coffee, and a march through town.
Two days later, after leaving the ancestral homestead of Adrian Van Zeeland and its mysteries, the couples headed back to Brussels, where they spent the night at the villa of Jan Werts, now a prominent European correspondent for a variety of publications, but also a boyhood friend of John Van Zeeland from Gemert. The next day it was back to Montreal, and thence to Ottawa. From there, Russ and Myra drove to Niagara Falls and onward to Holland, Mich., where they took the car ferry home across the lake, and arrived back in Little Chute Oct. 10.
Hospitality most memorable
There are many things the Dercks will remember about this trip: the Dutch passion for fresh air with windows always open at night, bicycles so plentiful that parking garages are built just for them, brick omnipresent as a construction material (wood is a scarce, regulated commodity among the environmentally conscious Dutch), even the smallest backyards landscaped, hedges within hedges of varied colors, the remarkable absence of clutter, the Gemert city song, written by a priest, that tolls out every hour from municipal buildings.
Most of all, though, they’ll remember the hospitality, from their friends and relatives, and especially the home so graciously opened by Harry and Gerta Donkers.
“I just couldn’t believe how wonderful they were to us,” says Myra. “They just treated you like long-lost friends. Family is very important to them. … Everybody just greeted us like we were the Lost Dauphin almost, and we didn’t expect that.”
Would they make the trip again? No, not at their age, but Myra’s relatives from Gemert plan to come to the States, and the Derckses are looking forward to it.
“We expect we’re going to get a lot of company now, and we would enjoy that,” she says.