Welcome to Pieter and Waita Klapwijk's personal pages

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. There's an active Klapwijk Genealogical Society in the Netherlands that details the origins of the family name. Basically, 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. The picture of the crest was originally "pinched" from a relative's former site in Holland (bedankt Peter), but since then I ran across the former 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 quite few years ago now in the days before Google's dominance, 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.

KlapwijkselaantjeKlapwijkseweg

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.

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.

Steveston boardwalk view                Steveston view

Want to find out more about Richmond, where we live? Or Vancouver, where Pieter 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".

Europa

Guestbook use seems to have fallen out of favour, so we have deleted it, but, if there's something you'd like to say, simply use the form on the contact page.



Pages last updated 28 November 2018