De Boer

De Boer names the trade and nothing else: boer, the farmer, the man who worked the land. On the 2007 count it stood eleventh among all Dutch surnames.

Then the word outgrew the trade. Carried south by the settlers of the Cape, boer stopped describing an occupation and began naming a people: the Boers, the farmer-colonists of the veld, whose descendants are the Afrikaners.

At home the distribution is anything but even. The heaviest concentration of bearers anywhere is on Urk, where 5.88 percent of the inhabitants answer to the name; in Belgium the peak is Leuven, at 0.27 percent. The same word threw off Boer, Boers, Boere and Den Boer.

Adam Ruurds de Boer was born at Akkrum in 1721, son of Ruurd Arriens and Dirckie Adams Slotje, and the paperwork of his life is a farmer's paperwork. He married Jeltje Everts Ecoma at Oldeboorn on 18 April 1749, and when her father died in 1750 the household moved onto the Ecoma-state at Oldeboorn. Jeltje died in 1754; Adam married Jeltje Hotzes in 1755; and when the Ecoma family gave up the lease in 1759 he took a farm near Deersum, where at least ten more children were born and where he lived until his death in 1800.

What made him famous was ice. Friesland knew him as Adam Hurdrider, the hard skater, and the stories that gathered on him are about jumping. The best known has him clearing a hole in the ice at Oude Schouw twenty-two metres across, and the Frisian saying that keeps his words at that moment is still in use. The distance may well have grown in the telling; what survives in writing is the note by Vegilin van Claerbergen, who set down that he had watched the farmer from Akkrum jump ten metres, twelve, and further.

The story the Frisians told best is the one where Groningen challenged him to a short-track match. On the day he was nowhere to be seen, and the organisers were already asking whether it would happen at all when the Hurdrider came up the ice out of Friesland, just before the start. He raced without a rest and without taking his coat off. The Groninger won the first heat; Adam took the second by a hair and the third by a hair, and the crowd began jeering at the margin. So he took the coat off and asked for one more run, and was halfway back from the turn when he met his opponent still going out.

Francijntje Martens de Boer was born at Harlingen on 18 October 1784, eldest daughter and second-eldest of thirteen children. Her father Marten de Boer was a clerk for the navy at the state yard in Harlingen and a musician besides, and the family had little to spare. In 1794, at ten, she was taken out of school to help a mother with too much on her. She kept her own reading and writing going, and from fourteen went out on call as a seamstress and knitter in the burgher houses of the town.

Around 1800 she went into service, first with dominee T. Radsma at Hempens, then with a baker in Leeuwarden, where she met the Mennonite community under dominee Jan Brouwer, who received her as a member in 1806. Her mother's death took her back to Harlingen to run the household there from 1807 until her father died in 1810. In 1811 she took a place as a maid with the Tuijnhout family at Jorwerd, and when her employer was made municipal secretary of Sneek she moved with them and stayed until 1828. At Sneek she met the poet Fenna Mastenbroek, who pressed her to publish.

The book came out in 1815 as Dichtproeven van Francijntje de Boer, dienstmaagd te Sneek: verse attempts by Francijntje de Boer, maidservant at Sneek. She put the job on the title page and used it again in 1821. Four collections appeared between 1815 and 1825, three of them for the young, in deliberately plain language, about home, virtue and undecorated religion. Gedichtjes voor kinderen went through eight printings by the end of 1870 and was translated into French in 1835; it spread because schools handed it out as a prize and taught out of it. She was known in her lifetime as far as the Tweede Kamer, though the verdict on the verse never settled: some praised the plainness, others called it rhyming with nothing beneath it.

She was proud of her position, and proud that a whole working life had needed only five employers. In 1828, at 44, she went to Heerenveen as housekeeper to the widower Siebe Tuymelaar, left a year earlier with five children under age; she brought them up and saw them marry, and published very little afterwards. She died in his house in 1852. Her gravestone, kept when the grave was cleared, is in Museum Heerenveen.

Hijbo Everdes de Boer was born at Emden on 10 February 1776, son of a hired skipper. He was trained for the sea and joined the army instead, enlisting as a private in the 4th Battalion of Jagers of the Batavian Republic on 15 June 1795. He was fourier two months later and sergeant by April. He served in the German campaign of 1796 and against the Anglo-Russian invasion of North Holland in 1799, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Bergen and taking a bad wound; the year after, in the campaign against Austria, he did it again at Burg-Eberach.

A second lieutenancy in the 5th Battalion of Jagers came in 1802, and with it a detachment sent to Suriname, used in 1803 to put down a rising on Berbice. British troops captured him that same year and shipped him for Britain; the transport went down off the coast of Portugal and he was gravely injured. Back in the Netherlands he joined the 2nd Regiment of Infantry, campaigned in Germany in 1806 and 1807, and in 1808 met the man who decided the rest of his career, General David Hendrik Chassé, with whose Hollandse Brigade his regiment left for Spain. After Durango and Missa d'Ibor, Chassé took him onto his staff as orderly officer, and through Chassé he went to the French 34e Regiment d'Infanterie de Ligne as a captain.

He asked for his discharge during the 1814 campaign in France, because of the turn things had taken at home. In February 1815 he was made captain-adjutant to Chassé, by then in Dutch service and commanding the 3rd Netherlands Division of I Corps; on 18 June that division had a serious part in the battle at Waterloo, where De Boer was wounded once more and for which he was given the Militaire Willems-Orde. Major in 1817, he went out on Chassé's staff again when the Belgian Revolt broke out in 1830, and for the siege of the Citadel of Antwerp he received the Order of the Netherlands Lion, promotion to lieutenant-colonel, and by royal decree of 2 February 1833 the title of jonkheer. He came home with the army in 1834 as colonel of the general staff, but his health failed quickly and he died on 30 January 1838, buried with military honours. The noble De Boer family he had founded ran out in 1856, with the death of his daughter.

Esther de Boer-van Rijk was born Ester van Rijk in Rotterdam on 29 July 1853, into a modest Orthodox Jewish family: her father an administrator, her mother a seamstress. Her father died when she was eight, and from twelve she worked in her mother's sewing workshop, expected to become a seamstress herself. The family regarded the theatre as morally dangerous. She got there through amateur companies anyway, first appearing on stage in 1867 and taking a best-actress prize at nineteen, which brought an engagement with the Rotterdam company of Le Gras, Van Zuylen en Haspels and a professional debut in 1874.

She acquired the surname in 1881 by marrying the musician Henri de Boer, and moved to Amsterdam in 1882 when he took a position with the opera company. He fell seriously ill soon afterwards and in the end could not work at all, which left her carrying the household under money pressure that never lifted. In 1893 she joined De Nederlandsche Tooneelvereeniging, a democratically organised company with idealistic aims and, by her own account, the finest years of her career, and there became the actress of Herman Heijermans' work, from Ghetto in 1898 onward.

Kniertje in Op hoop van zegen arrived in 1900. She played the part more than 1,200 times, and again in the film versions of 1918 and 1934. Annemie in De meid (1908), Brigitta in Nocturne (1910) and Eva in Eva Bonheur (1917) followed. When the NTV went bankrupt in 1912 and Heijermans' later company was dissolved in 1922 she founded her own touring company, and led the De Boer-van Rijk Ensemble from 1933 until shortly before her death. Short of money herself, she gave to tuberculosis aftercare and to Jewish organisations. She died at her Amsterdam home on 7 September 1937, and thousands walked in the funeral procession.

Geert Egberts Boer (1832-1904) was born at Roderwolde and took his degree in 1864 from the theological school at Kampen, after which he entered the ministry. In 1873 he was called to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Three years later the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church established a theological school of its own and appointed him its first professor.

He opened it with his own books and a curriculum modelled on the Kampen one he had come through, and taught there from 1876 until 1902. The school became Calvin Theological Seminary, and Calvin College grew out of it. He argued for Christian primary education too, and in 1968 the college opened the Boer-Bennink residence hall in his name.

The Dutch record of the name is long and almost entirely unconnected. Feike de Boer (1892-1976) was mayor of Amsterdam. Sjoukje Bokma de Boer (1860-1939) was a writer, Jan Hendrik de Boer (1899-1971) a physicist and chemist, Theo de Boer (1932-2021) a philosopher, Cees Rienks de Boer (1881-1966) a municipal architect. Gerrit de Boer (1923-1944) and Klaas de Boer (1912-1945) are both entered as resistance fighters. Yvo de Boer, born in 1954, headed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The ice keeps recurring with no family behind it: long after Adam Hurdrider the register holds the skaters Lieuwe de Boer, born 1951, Robbert-Kees Boer, born 1981, and Margot Boer, born 1985. The sources link none of them to any of the others.