Yes indeed, that's the Klapwijk family crest above. The "Klapwijk" genealogical society commissioned the design of a family crest a few years ago, based on historical information. The first use of our family name can be traced to the 1500's and the use of marks on farm houses and buildings was very prevalent in those days. Some of the old literature appears to indicate the use of a "Drudenvoet" (Druid's or witches' foot) and the crescent moon as marks on early family sites. This crest was originally "pinched" from a relative's former site in Holland (bedankt Peter), but since then I ran across the site for the Reunion Usersgroup (a Mac based genealogy program), and there I found a slightly larger (and better) version. I stumbled across these sites when, just for fun, I did a Yahoo search on my last name a few years ago; Peter's site was the first match out of 147 and the Reunion site was the last one. The Reunion site was done by Dick Klapwijk. Dick did a tremendous amount of genealogical research on our family and wrote "Vier Eeuwen Klapwijk", a book that traces our family history from the first use of the name "Clappwijck" in the early 16th century to the present. The town I grew up in, Pijnacker, is a key part of our family's history and as you can see from the pictures below, a couple of roads in the area, as well as a subdivision, are named after us.
This site and these pages have been up on the web in one form or other since about 1997. The site has expanded in more or less chronological order as we have made changes around house and yard, but it's time for another major overhaul. Navigation will be top and bottom only, so that the whole width of the page can be displayed and make the site somewhat easier to navigate. A sitemap has also been incorporated.
To give our out-of-town-and-country visitors a better idea of what our part of the world is like, here are a couple of pictures
taken from the Steveston docks in Richmond. We live about an 8 minute walk from these docks. Click on either picture to find out a BIT
more about Steveston.
Want to find out more about Richmond, where we live? Or Vancouver, where Peter worked? What's the weather like out your way, here's the Richmond weather.
Richmond was all-a-buzz in the summer of 2002 with the excitement the Tall Ships brought, all 20 of them. This is the ship the Netherlands sent: "Europa".
Kindly to advise me of broken links or site errors, thanks.
TTFN.(which is the abbreviation of the old English expression: TaTa For Now)