The webmaster is not the engineer and inventor Henk de Beijer, who travels around the world promoting alternativbe energy, even on our sister-island of Bonaire, but the Blind Henk de Beijer, who has been engaged for twenty years in developing services for the blind and visually impaired in Aruba and the Caribbean.
Who knows we may be related, of course, something like him being a great-great-grandson of a cousin of my grandfather, or something like that. Who knows?
In any case, there is a very probable chance that we are both descended from a Johannes de Beijer, who also called himself "de Bavari". In a book about the "De Beijer" family which may be found in the archives of the Mosaic association in Kleve (Germany) it says that the "de Beijer" family has been traced back to Catharina, daughter of Albert I, duke of Bavaria, who married in 1379 with Willem, duke of Gulik and Gelre in the Netherlands. In her entourage the family patriarch Johannes de Beijer could be found, whose Latin name was "De Bavari", born in 1349 and eques auratus (i.e. Knight of the Golden Spur) of St. Cecilia. His wife, Maria van Lathem bestowed him with 15 sons and nine daughters.
Anyone who wants to know more about the family history, and speaks reasonable German, can click on the next link:
I was born in the Netherlands on the 7th of July 1932, in a very old village called Gendt, situated in the curve of the river Waal, in the region called Over Betuwe. My wife's maiden-name is Marina Felicia Mathilda; she was born in Aruba, on the 2nd of June 1936. "Mathilda" is indeed her surname, a fact that will cause problems at times.
Her father always maintained that his real surname was "Stredels". According to him, a stupid civil servant at the Civil registry Office had made a mistake in his father's case (my wife's grand-father). Things like that did happen at times in the islands of the Netherlands' Antilles.
Women's Christian names as Surnames are quite frequent in the Netherlands' Antilles - particularly in Curaçao -, as a consequence of extramarital children, who were not recognized by the father, especially in the case of the mother being a slave.
Marina and I got married on the 29th of April 1965 in the Roman Catholic church in Santa Cruz, Aruba. After I had lost my sight completely in 1972 we decided to settle definitely in Aruba. We did so as from the 21st of December 1973.
We met for the first time, when Marina came to the Netherlands in 1953, to be trained as a scool-teacher at the residential school of the Dominican nuns in Reuver, Limburg. She was allowed to pass her holidays at our home, where my sister Trees brought her with her. That's how.
The engineer and inventor of energy saving systems Henk de Beijer can be found on the following website: