portretten van Ben en Bet
Bernard Stapel Bet Hintzen
patrilinear genealogy matrilinear genealogy
Johannes Bernardus Stapel and his family.    1876 - 1935




Bronnen:

Family archive; newspaper clips

Familycards from Bergen (L) and Roosendaal


Memories of family members, see family sources

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Search for their daily life.
Details about the Bernard Stapel family's daily life are scarce. His eight children had in common that they told their kin preciously little about each other and their history. Generally I believe, they thought it wiser not to discuss frustrating subjects. As a consequence, until this century, our knowledge of the family tree was limited to the idylle that my grandfather was born in Afferden, a village on the Meuse in Limburg, where my greatgrandfather Jan Willem Carel Stapel was a county constable. His later transfers and eventual dismissal were never mentioned, but certainly included in this unspecified silence. Yet, its core is possibly rooted generations before, in the origin of our family. Fact is that the memories of the cousins I spoke during my search easily fit on this single page. Most of it was new to me though and the rest I compiled from photo albums, newspaperclips end civic records.
Bernard came with his family to Roosendaal at the age of seven. His childhood is an empty page for us. Not yet twenty he must have started working at the railways. The rest of what we know can be read on this page, on the railways in the left menu and on the pages in the top menu.
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Left photo: Emmastraat 78 ±1918. Upright: 3 lodgers. Mid: Marinus. Sitting from left: neighbour&child, Bet & Ben. Sidewalk: Henk (left), Jan and Betsie, opposite their house.

Bet fell dec.1923 from the stairs, so unfortunately that her 9th child, a girl, was stillborn. Seven weeks later she found her own grave.

Right photo: Spoorstraat 210 ±1928. From left: Ben, Rie, Marinus, Bets, father Bernard, stephmother Nella and opa Chris Hintzen.
paper
Already early in life Bernard experienced a fatal accident in his family: he was hardly ten when his oldest brother Jan (Hendrik Willem Frederik) died very painfully. (See " De Grondwet" on the right)
Name:Bernard Stapel, son of Jan Willem Carel, David, Johan Hendrik and David.
Born:13-mei-1876 Afferden (L), moved to Steenbergen 1879 and Roosendaal 1883.
Married:Elisabeth Maria Hintzen 5-mei-1904 Zwollerkerspel, cert.36.
(*4-12-1880, †22-01-1924)
Petronella Tanna van der Laan 29-mrt-1928 Flushing (*5-04-1880, †15-06-1948)
Deceased:19-mrt-1935 in Roosendaal (cert.52), 10:15 p.m. due to an accident while shunting.
Profession: 1895-1935, near fourty years railway engineer, stationed in Roosendaal.
Merry singers, taciturn family.
Our Stapel family loved singing and we did it well, my aunt Rie told us, youngest daughter of Bernard and Bet. After more than 40 years my sister Marian and I visited her May 7, 2005, with her daughters Tineke and Els. That was a truly fortunate coincidence, as five days later she died. Tineke explained that her mother never was communicative about the family, like most of her kin by the way. But that day she was overjoyed that we finally arrived and told us in detail who was who on the yellowed family pictures we put in her hands and on the wall. Then she remembered too how beautifully they sang at home, so that the whole neighbourhood was listening in on a warm summers evening when the windows were open. That was easy for me to imagine, because at our home my father's voice carried the whole family with him when we were singing Christmas carols. The rare thing he told about his father he told quite often: His father was a gentle man, but if you misbehaved you got a whack that stayed with you for quite a while.

Betsy, oldest daughter of uncle Chris and aunt Annie, knew our grandfather too: "My last meeting with Opa Stapel was in 1932, I must have been four years old when he collected me in Schiedam to take me to Roosendaal, the Spoorstraat. I remember that uncle Ben was still attending school and also that there was a well in the backyard. The train journey back to Schiedam must have been with Opa as well; he was crying when he left us! A bunch of emotional whimpers they were! Three years later we lost him. I was 7 years old then and it was a very emotional time with us at home. My dad was ill for three weeks, quite overcome. Regrettably we never talked about it. No explanation, nothing at all, which would have been much better for us all. But even later completely taboo. A lot may so pass, between four walls in families. I don't need to tell you that, do I?"

Being an engineer often doing night-shifts he must have slept a lot during daytime: Henks daughter Beppie especially remembers him with a sleepyhead in this box bed. But now and then she was allowed to come with him to the adjacent cafe at the corner of the street where he used to drink his favorite "old brown". Perhaps he really needed to wet his tongue every so often, because like her father his voice sounded a little sticky.


(home = www.cstapel.nl)