Visser

Visser is a trade said in one word. It comes from vis, fish, and named the man who took his living from water. In the Low Countries that covered two quite different lives under one byname: the deep-sea herring busses that went to the North Sea grounds and stayed out there, and the inland meres and creeks worked with eel traps by men who never lost sight of their own church tower.

Salt or fresh, every water in the country had its Visser, and a trade practised in that many places at once threw the byname up independently wherever it was worked. No one family stands behind the name. The densest survival is still out on the water: at the 2007 count the heaviest concentration of Vissers anywhere in the Netherlands was on Schiermonnikoog, where one resident in twenty-five carried it.

In 2007 Visser was the eighth commonest surname in the Netherlands, with 49,525 bearers. Across the border it barely registers: 433 people carried it in Belgium in 2008, the largest cluster at Retie.

That gap is not an accident of migration. The commonest names in Belgium are almost all patronymics; the Dutch list is a mixed set, running from Visser through Van Dijk to De Jong. The name also appears as De Visser, the fisherman with the article in front, and in the older spelling Visscher.

Coenraad Visser was baptised at Arnemuiden on 9 March 1755, a son of Casparus Visser, tax receiver, secretary of Axel and mayor of Arnemuiden. He qualified as a notary in 1777, became auditeur-militair at Zierikzee two years later, and in 1781 married Alexandrina van der Hucht. He was a Patriot at a time when that was an expensive thing to be: on 24 September 1787, after Prussian troops came in and the political weather turned, his house was plundered and he got out to Antwerp.

The Batavian revolution brought him home. Zierikzee made him mayor in 1795, and later that year he took a seat in the assembly of provisional representatives of the people of Zeeland and the presidency of the province's committee of general welfare, vigilance and security. From 1796 he sat in the provincial executive, and from 1797 in the national legislatures: the Second National Assembly, the Constituent Assembly, then the chair of the Second Chamber.

Then the revolution turned on him. After the coup of 12 June 1798 he was arrested and held at Huis ten Bosch, and freed by decree on 12 July. He was back in government in the department of the Scheldt and Meuse from 1799 to 1801, and sat in the First Chamber in 1801.

Dorothea Visser, called Dora, was born at Gendringen in the Catholic part of the Achterhoek on 28 September 1819, the middle child of nine in a day labourer's family. At twelve she was put into service on a farm. Herding the cows there she was butted and fell, and the wound she took to her leg never closed; she was left lame, fit only for seated work, and she offered the pain up for the conversion of sinners.

From December 1843, when she was twenty-four, her confessors recorded the stigmata, the wounds of the crucifixion, on her body. Two chaplains in turn, Herfkens and then Teus Kerkhof, kept the diaries in which that hidden life is written down. The newspapers went after her as a swindler. Her years fell across the contested restoration of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy in the Netherlands, which raised a wave of anti-papal feeling, and partly for that the archbishop of Utrecht moved Kerkhof out to Zieuwent in 1861.

When Kerkhof was sent on to Kloosterburen, a remote Catholic enclave in Groningen, Dora went as his housekeeper and sacristy help, and the same phenomena are recorded there too. He became parish priest of Olburgen in 1872, and she died in the presbytery there on 12 July 1876, having carried the wounds, as he noted, for almost thirty-three years, the span of Christ's life on earth.

Her name faded until 1965, when the journalist B. Kerkhoffs wrote up the priest's surviving notes in De Gelderlander. The devotion stayed private, priests and lay people going quietly to the grave at Olburgen. In 2008 the archdiocese of Utrecht accepted testimony of a miraculous healing through her intercession, from a man in Hengelo, and in 2013 the finished dossier went to Rome, where her cause is still open.

Rudolph Berend Visser was born at Deventer on 3 September 1812, son of the merchant Juriaan Hendrik Visser and Zwanida Helena Budde. Between 1839 and 1857 he was mayor of three Overijssel municipalities one after another, Steenwijk, then Hengelo, then Ambt en Stad Delden, and from 1850 until his death he sat in the Provincial States of Overijssel as well. He was a knight fourth class of the Military William Order.

In 1851 he married Carolina Berhardina Palthe, of the noble Palthe family, and they had two daughters; a sister of his was married to Willem Hendrik Vijfhuis, a judge and member of the Second Chamber. He died at Wiene on 27 December 1857 and lies in the general cemetery at Delden.

Dirk Visser, heer van Hazerswoude, was born at Zaandam on 1 November 1830. He read Roman and contemporary law at Leiden, took his doctorate there in 1856 with a thesis on political economy and public law set against the books of Grotius, and practised at the Amsterdam bar. He sat first in the First Chamber and then, from 14 July 1886, in the Second Chamber for the Liberale Unie, holding it until his death on 4 October 1890 at Heemstede, where he had inherited the Westerhout estate in 1873.

Alibert Cornelis Visser van IJzendoorn, born at Gorinchem in 1858, went round the same course in reverse: the bar first, then a chair in civil and commercial law at Leiden. He was in the Provincial States at thirty-two, and in 1913 he carried the hitherto solidly right-wing district of Gorinchem for the free liberals. He was quoted for his verdict on abolishing the First Chamber, that nobody would mourn it but the ushers, and in 1920 he was the only liberal to vote against the primary education act of the minister De Visser, the same word with the article in front. He could be cutting in debate, and was liked anyway. He died at The Hague in 1924.

How thickly the name lies is clearest in the Jan Vissers. The Dutch reference list carries eleven and has to separate them by trade: two painters, a marathon skater from Hoogkarspel who won the national championship on natural ice, a flautist, the bass player of the George Baker Selection, a priest and theologian, a footballer, a bus driver, a Paralympic cross-country competitor and a weatherman on RTV Noord-Holland. There is a Jan Visser museum at Helmond as well.

The crowding runs on through the rest of the list. Sculpture is full of the name, from Tjipke Visser (1876-1955) to Carel Visser; Elizabeth Visser (1908-1987) held a chair in ancient history, and Arno Visser became president of the Netherlands Court of Audit. Aaltje Visser (1851-1871) was the first woman to qualify as a certified pharmacist's assistant, and Atie Ridder-Visser (1914-2014) and Tony Visser (1916-2005) were both in the resistance.

And the name never really left the water. Klaas Visser (1891-1959) took a ship's command, as master of the Willem Barendsz, and winter water kept the skaters Ria Visser, Leo Visser, Irene Visser and Esmee Visser. It travelled as far as any Dutch name did, to the Belgian footballer and rower Guillaume Visser (1880-1952) and to Richard Visser, once a minister of public health on Aruba. Close to fifty thousand people in one country answer to a word that once meant nothing more than the man with the nets.