Van den Berg

Van den Berg is a topographic surname, of or from the berg, and in Dutch a berg is whatever counts locally as high ground. The record puts it plainly: the name marks origin on a heuvel or a verheffing, a hill or a rise, in a country where a dune, a terp or a slight swell in a polder was elevation enough to give a household its address. It belongs with the Portuguese Monte and the Polish Gorski, surnames built on a feature rather than a place.

But there is a second reading, and it is the one that matters to anyone tracing the name. Van den Berg can point at a specific place: Geertruidenberg, 's-Heerenberg, Sint Odilienberg. One household was named for the ground it stood on, another for the town it had left, and by the time either reached a register the two looked identical. That is the distance between a family that never moved and a family that did, and the name alone will not say which.

By 2007, 58,562 people in the Netherlands carried Van den Berg or one of its variants (Van de Berg, Van der Berg, Van den Berge, Van den Bergh, Van den Berghe, Van den Berghen), making it the fourth commonest surname in the country, against 936 bearers in Belgium in 1998. Abroad it agglutinates into Vandenberg; in Dutch print it shortens to v.d. Berg. Most of those households already answered to the name before the registration of 1811 made surnames compulsory; the clerk wrote them down, he did not invent them.

Lodewijk Willem Christiaan van den Berg was born at Haarlem on 19 October 1845, son of Simon van den Berg and Sophie Charlotte Immerzeel. He read language, geography and ethnology at Leiden and took his doctorate there in 1868 summa cum laude, with a thesis on property right in Islam. He left almost at once for the Netherlands Indies, held a succession of administrative and legal posts, and in 1878 was put in charge of Indies and Oriental languages and Islamic law. In 1874 he had published De Beginselen van het Mohammedaansche Recht, set out according to the imams Abu Hanifa and Shafi'i.

He wrote on the Prijaji of Java and Madura, and is best known for Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l'archipel Indien, his study of the Arabs of Hadhrami descent in Indonesia, and he was regularly at odds with Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the other Arabist working in the Indies. He married Francoise Steup in 1884 and came home in 1887 to a chair at the Indische Instelling in Delft. The rest was politics, with the Anti-Revolutionaire Partij: the Delft council from 1901, the Provincial States of South Holland from 1902 to 1911, the mayoralty of Delft from 1910 to 1920, and the Eerste Kamer from 1911 to 1923. He died at Delft on 2 March 1927.

Marinus van den Berge, called Rinus, was born at Rotterdam on 12 March 1900 and ran the 100 metres. At the Paris Olympics of 1924 he was in the Dutch 4 x 100 metres relay with Jan de Vries, Jacob Boot and Harry Broos, and the team won the third heat in 42.0 seconds, equalling the world record the British had set in the first. The Dutch were third in their semi-final and took bronze in the final in 41.8, cheered in the training quarters with the squad's own cry, 'heja, heja, litsjumeaux, kwatta, kwatta'.

At the home Games in Amsterdam in 1928 he entered four events and won none: the 4 x 400 metres relay went out in the second heat, he was fourth in the quarter-finals of both the 100 and the 200, and he did not survive the heats of the 400. Domestically he was steadier, taking four Dutch titles at 100 metres and five at 200 between 1925 and 1932. He died in Rotterdam, the city he was born in, on 23 October 1972.

Jan Hendrik van den Berg was born at Deventer on 11 June 1914. Between 1933 and 1936 he took teaching diplomas for primary and for high school education, the second with a focus on mathematics, and published papers on entomology. He then entered medical school at Utrecht, specialising in psychiatry and neurology, and finished his dissertation in 1946. A year later, after study in France and Switzerland, he was made head of department at the Utrecht psychiatric clinic, lecturing in psychopathology and holding a chair of pastoral psychology in the theology faculty there.

In 1954 he moved to Leiden as professor of psychology. His subject was phenomenological psychotherapy and metabletics, the psychology of historical change, argued out in books including A Different Existence and The Changing Nature of Man. He spent most of his later life in a monumental house on the market in the old centre of Woudrichem, and died at nearby Gorinchem on 22 September 2012.

Janwillem van den Berg was born at Akkrum on 26 November 1920 and worked as a speech scientist and medical physicist. He played the major part in establishing the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory of voice production, published in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research in 1958; its importance is that it gave modern speech science the foundation for its models of how the vocal folds behave.

He also designed the first implantable pacemaker that could be switched to a higher beat rate when the patient was more active; the first experiments on an R-top triggered pacemaker were carried out and electrodes to the heart tested in animals, work that made his name among the cardiologists of the period. He died at Groningen on 18 October 1985.

Carel Benjamin van den Berg was born on 12 February 1924 and spent his childhood in Leiden, at the Stedelijk Gymnasium. He studied at Delft between 1942 and 1944, briefly in Amsterdam after the Second World War, and finally philosophy at Groningen. He won the Dutch Correspondence Chess Championship in 1943, the Daniel Noteboom memorial four times, in 1948, 1953, 1954 and 1959, and the title of International Master in 1963.

He was a theorist as much as a competitor, editing the Losbladige Schaakberichten and working with Max Euwe on the Candidates Tournament at Zurich in 1953 and the Theorie der Schaakopeningen series. He played fourth board for the Netherlands at the 13th Olympiad in Munich in 1958, and his best results came in the Clare Benedict Cup: individual gold and team silver at Lenzerheide in 1956, team silver at Bern in 1957 and Lucerne in 1963, bronze at West Berlin in 1965. He died on 29 June 1971.

Jeen van den Berg was born on 8 January 1928, a schoolteacher by profession and a long track speed skater by reputation. On 3 February 1954 he won the Elfstedentocht in a record seven hours and thirty-five minutes, a time that stood for thirty-one years before Evert van Benthem bettered it. He entered the race a record seven times, first in 1947 and last in 1997, and came third in the infamous edition of 1963.

On the oval he was a competent international rather than a champion, skating at the Winter Olympics of 1956 and 1960, with a best placing of 19th at 5000 metres. In 1973 he became the first Dutch marathon skating champion. He died in a nursing home on 8 October 2014 at the age of 86.

The rest of the register holds one stated kinship and only one: Christiaan Frederik van den Berg, a Dutch resistance fighter, and Cornelia Johanna van den Berg-van der Vlis, also a resistance fighter and his wife. Gerrit Jan van den Berg was a third of them, and Albert Van den Berg (1890-1945) saved hundreds of Jews. Behind them stand Ahasuerus van den Berg, minister and poet, and Norbertus van den Berg, who was president of De Nederlandsche Bank.

The modern list runs wide and joins up nowhere. Lodewijk van den Berg (1932-2022) was a Dutch-born American chemical engineer and astronaut; Stephan van den Berg, born 1962, was the first Olympic gold medallist in windsurfing; Helma van den Berg (1965-2003) was a linguist of the Caucasian languages. None is recorded as kin to any other, which is what a surname of this size means, and the register never says whether the berg behind it was a town called Geertruidenberg or a rise in the field behind the house.