De Jong

De Jong means 'the young'. It is not a trade and not a father's name; it is a word a Dutch town hung on one man to stop confusing him with another. Two men in one small place answered to the same forename, the record needed to know which was meant, and one became de jonge, the young one.

That leaves a name with a missing half. The label only carried information while the other man stood beside him, and the other man was never written down, not his name and not his relation. What survives is one side of a comparison. In 2007 it was carried by 83,973 people in the Netherlands, the country's commonest surname, every one of them carrying one half of a distinction whose second term is gone.

Dutch kept the same word alive as a working suffix, and there the pair is still on the page. De Jonge separates a man from an older namesake, usually his father, exactly as junior does now, and de Oude marks the elder. Pieter Brueghel de Jonge was the son of Pieter Bruegel de Oude, Jan Brueghel de Jonge of Jan Brueghel de Oude, Willem van de Velde de Jonge of Willem van de Velde de Oude. Dutch applied the tag to foreigners too: Hans Holbein, the Bavarian painter, is Hans Holbein de Jonge.

It did not always mean son. The admiral Cornelis Evertsen de Jonge was the nephew of Cornelis Evertsen de Oude, which is the whole system in one entry: two kinsmen sharing a name, sorted by age. Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge, merchant, burgomaster and VOC director, carried it as well. In none of them is de Jonge a surname, though it is sometimes mistaken for one. It is the label the surname was made out of, caught before it hardened.

The surname settled into three spellings and all three are in use. The form Dutch still runs as a live description is the one with the -e, and the documented bearers in this family's record all carry it: they are De Jonges, not De Jongs, a Zeeland line of law officers, archivists and members of both chambers.

The name is thickest in Rotterdam, where 2,525 people carry it, but its greatest concentration is on Ameland, at 4.74 per cent of the island.

Johannes Cornelis de Jonge was born at Zierikzee on 9 May 1793 into an old patrician family of Zeeland notables. His ancestor Bonifacius de Jonge had been Raadpensionaris of Zeeland from 1615 to 1625, and when King William I reorganised the Dutch aristocracy in 1814 the family received the title of jonkheer.

In 1810 the French authorities in Zierikzee put a quantity of medieval Zeeland charters up for auction, and the boy was instrumental in saving a number of them. That brought him to the notice of Hendrik van Wijn, first archivist of the Batavian Republic, who became the new kingdom's first Rijksarchivaris in 1814 and nominated de Jonge as his deputy that March. He was reading law and history at Leiden throughout, served in the student militia during the Waterloo campaign, and took his doctorate on 27 July 1816.

Van Wijn died in 1831 and de Jonge succeeded him as Rijksarchivaris. In that post he wrote the Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Zeewezen, a naval history of the Netherlands in six volumes published between 1833 and 1848 and built directly out of the Dutch naval archives. In 1844, midway through the run, a fire in the archives of the Department of the Navy destroyed a large part of those records, so his history had to come in the place of the primary documents it was drawn from.

He spent the rest of the office pulling documents in rather than watching them go: in 1833 he secured for the National Archives the original Union of Utrecht treaty, along with medieval charters from the charter room of Holland. He catalogued the archives and the royal coin cabinet to open both to use, and was alderman of The Hague from 1844 until his death in 1853.

Marinus Willem de Jonge van Campensnieuwland, born at Zierikzee in 1786, was the brother of Johannes Cornelis and the eldest son of Willem Adriaan de Jonge, mayor of Zierikzee, who bought the lordship of Campensnieuwland in 1830. He took his Leiden doctorate in 1807, was sworn as an advocate at the high court in The Hague, and his pleadings against Louis Bonaparte over the Pavilion at Haarlem, printed in 1820, were remembered for their form and for the victory they won over Jonas Daniël Meijer.

He sat in the Tweede Kamer from 1829 to 1841 and chaired it in 1838; in 1831 the king put him on a small group preparing a revision of the constitution meant to take the wind out of the Belgian rebels' sails. He was raadsheer in the Hoge Raad from 1833, then Minister of Justice from 1844 to 1848 and a vigorous opponent of the liberal revision proposals. He resigned in 1848, when Willem II turned in a single day from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal, and died at his country house near Veur in 1858.

Jan Karel Jacob de Jonge, born in The Hague on 17 June 1828, was the son of Johannes Cornelis. He took his Leiden doctorate in 1852 on the diplomacy of the Austrian War of Succession, then served at the Rijksarchief from 1854, as clerk of the Eerste Kamer from 1858 and as deputy Rijksarchivaris alongside it from 1866. He directed the Mauritshuis from 1875, and the Eerste Kamer made him its griffier in 1877, a post he held two and a half years before his death in 1880.

From 1862 he issued De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Oost-Indië, thirteen volumes of unpublished documents from the old colonial archive. He wrote up the Barents relics, the objects Dutch seafarers left on Nova Zembla when they sailed away in 1597 and that were recovered in 1871 and 1876. And he completed and published his father's naval history, so the six volumes that had to stand in for a burnt archive were finished by the next man of the name.

François Clement de Jonge, born at Zierikzee in 1766, read law at Leiden and served his native town as pensionaris and secretary, sitting for it in the States of Zeeland until 1795. Nothing in the record ties him to the Campensnieuwland brothers.

The French retreat brought him back. In 1813 he was Commissaris-Generaal of Zeeland for the Prince of Orange, in 1814 he took a seat in the States-General, and in 1815 he was one of the Commission of Twenty-one appointed to write a draft constitution for the new kingdom. He then spent nine years in the Tweede Kamer and eight in the Eerste Kamer from 1826, and died at Middelburg on the last day of 1834.

The courts kept taking the name. Caspar de Jonge, born 1826, was a raadsheer in the Hoge Raad, and Willem Caspar de Jonge (1866-1925) sat in both chambers. Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge (1834-1907) was president of the District Court of The Hague and then a judge of the Supreme Court, and his son, also Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge (1875-1958), was Minister of War from 1917 to 1918 and governor-general of the Dutch East Indies from 1931 to 1936. Father and son under one name and one set of initials: the exact problem the byname was invented to solve, unsolved.

On the other side of the -e the name runs through modern Dutch public life. Piet de Jong (1915-2016) was prime minister and Johannes de Jong (1885-1955) an archbishop and cardinal. Loe de Jong (1914-2005) was a historian and journalist, Alida de Jong (1885-1943) a member of the Tweede Kamer for the SDAP, Hantje de Jong (1906-1944) a preacher and a resistance fighter. Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024) was an artist and Frenkie de Jong is a footballer. A word that meant nothing on its own now needs no second half at all.