Category: misc

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My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a reputation in cattle raising. In his early twenties he had a choice of job offers to run a cattle farm in Argentina and to run a cattle farm in Twente, in the eastern part of the Netherlands. His mother wanted to be able to visit him by train, so the Argentina offer was refused. He worked on the farm Stepelerveld near Haaksbergen, Twente, since its founding in 1928, which was meant as a model farm. It already had mechanised milking from the start for instance. The farm’s owner, Ebs van Heek, son of textile barons, and my grandfather had a strong interest in cattle raising, trying to increase milk production per cow. Before the farm was constructed in 1928 (now a national monument) work had already been underway to bring together and raise cattle for it on a nearby farm. I don’t know when my grandfather was hired exactly, he may already have had some role before the farm’s construction. Cattle was my grandfathers passion. After the farm was sold in 1963 and my grandparents retired to the nearby village Boekelo, there were photos of us grandchildren on the living room dresser right next to similarly framed photos of price winning cows. Central on the mantel piece was a photo of a bull. It remained there for over 30 years.

It may have been the same bull he took a train trip with.

The farm had a locally famous bull, named Adolf (this was the 1920s, so no stigma attached to that name yet). There was a cattle fair in The Hague, on the other side of the country. My grandfather walked the bull to the station, and joined it inside a cattle car, hired for the purpose, for the train ride to The Hague. When he arrived he sent a postcard to the farm, saying ‘gakz’, meaning ‘goed aangekomen, Klaas Zijlstra‘, arrived well. Postage was based on the number of words. This kept it to half a cent. Then he spent three days at the cattle fair on the Malieveld (the largest field in The Hague, used for fairs and demonstrations for some 400 years), where he shared straw with the bull to sleep on in the open air. The bull won first prize. He walked back to the station boarded a cattle car again with the bull for the trip home, and showed up on foot with the bull and a victory cup at the farm.

In the story, the station was sometimes Haaksbergen (the nearest, about an hour’s walk from the farm) sometimes Hengelo station (a 3 hour walk). Although Haaksbergen connected to Hengelo, it was a different station from the one on the line towards The Hague, so it may have been easier to go to Hengelo as they’d otherwise had needed two cattle cars, one for each line. Still, as the railroad company for the Haaksbergen-Hengelo connection was founded and owned by the same textile barons, to connect the factories, it may well have been Haaksbergen, or the also nearby Boekelo on the same line.

As a child I heard the story repeatedly but never really knew when that happened. Thanks to digitised archives I now have more details.

Earlier this week I came across a version of this story online, written by the farm owner’s daughter, and she placed it in 1929. Having a year I then searched the digitised news paper archives for cattle fairs in The Hague, and found it was actually 1928.
In 1928 the Netherlands hosted the Olympics in Amsterdam, from 28 July to 12 August. It was the first edition to be called ‘the summer olympics’. The national cattle fair and exhibition took place just before, from 23 to 25 July, and was dubbed the ‘Olympic cattle fair’ in the press. It was a big event (I found 230 paper articles across the country about it for that week). Opened by two government ministers giving speeches, visited by members of the royal family on each day, the queen mother and the prince consort, though not the queen herself. Prizes were awarded for many different categories of cows, horses, pigs and goats. A special mention in the press talks about a new ‘contraption to measure the pulling strength of a horse’ being demonstrated. Amidst all that was my grandfather, two months before his 23rd birthday, with bull Adolf on a leash. And won first prize.

Which fact ended up in the papers with a photo:

Klaas Zijlstra and the bull, Malieveld 25 July 1928, published in the Utrecht Daily on 27 July 1928, photographer and copyright unknown.

Look at that enormous and muscled beast, coming to shoulder height of my grandfather. And then imagine traveling and sleeping next to it for 5 days!

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My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems.

Since 2007 the Royal Library has been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My blog, even though it is one of the oldest still maintained in the Netherlands, never was part of that effort. Mostly because it’s not very visible as a Dutch blog, as it is mostly written in English and resides on a .org domain (when I registered zylstra.org, private persons could not yet register .nl domains, only companies could). At an Internet Archive event organised by the Royal Library last year September I asked about archiving and they told me how to suggest my website for archiving.

Late last January I received a message that my website would be included in their archives from now on.

What followed were several test-runs with their harvester Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive. I wondered about how some of my website’s peculiarities would be dealt with by the harvester. Not every posting is listed on my site for instance, although each does have a direct URL. The years’ worth of weekly notes for instance are not listed in this site. Also many postings are never shown on the front page, and if you page through postings on the front page you will never encounter them. This is true for categories of posts like books, photos, and day to day topics. I discussed this with the web-archivist, who ran some tests. My week notes seemed to be included, but the pagination of the category of day to day stalled out at 180 pages, although there were more still.

To my surprise they also ran into volume limits. Apparently because of ‘bycatch’, things they archive from other sites because I reference them or embed them. In the past few years I have stopped embedding things, like photos, except for my slides, which are hosted on a separate domain I have registered. While it was normal that a site’s additional catch is larger than the site itself, for my site it was very different from what they were used to.
First they limited bycatch to 20GB in a test, and they ran out of space, then they set it at 40GB in a test, and still ran out of space. Raising the limits further did not help. In the end they decided to harvest just what is on my zylstra.org domain and not include any bycatch at all. Which is completely fine by me, precisely because I’ve made the effort to bring all kinds of external content ‘home’ to this domain.

Nevertheless it did surprise me that bycatch turned out to be a problem, as they are using a tool the Internet Archive itself uses too. I asked for some examples of the bycatch. They told me it wasn’t even possible to dump a URL list from the bycatch into a spreadsheet as it hit the maximum number of rows (around 65k iirc). I did get some of the URLs that contributed bigger volumes of bycatch. To my surprise I did not even recognise the links, except one.

One was obvious, 2800 attempts to harvest a page on live.staticflickr.com, as I link a lot to my Flickr hosted images, although I no longer embed them but have local versions on this domain.
Others were not obvious to me at all, theguardian.tv, vp.nyt.com and various content delivery networks. I link to none of them in this site. I do link to The Guardian, about 100 times, and to the NYT about 40 times, and I suppose if the harvester follows those links it will find additional material there that explains the bycatch more fully, if it harvests all the targets I link to too.

If that is the case, that it harvests everything I’ve linked to, then it is the long history of this blog that is the issue and makes the harvester hit its limits.

There are some 20.000 external links in this blog’s articles, as far as I can quickly estimate based on a full content export I made this week.
It basically means that if the harvester attempts to harvest all those links and what resources they include, it adds a number of pages to the archive, roughly equivalent to the current archive itself.

A weblog embraces what the world wide web is, a bunch of links to other websites. The name weblog says it. A web-log is a curation hub for web readers, pointing out other interesting stuff, and not trying to keep you here too long. Over 23 years of blogging yielded some 20.000 links to other websites. In terms of linking a blog becomes the web itself as much as it becomes its author’s avatar in terms of its content given enough time.

From now on my site will be updated in the Royal Library’s archives every year on March 5th.


The facade of the Royal Library in The Hague, photo by Ferdi de Gier, license CC-BY-SA

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At the European PKM Summit the past two days, Frank Meeuwsen ran a continuous atelier where people could make their own ‘zines and lino cuts. A welcoming space to make something by hand at an event full of inspiring but abstract conversations and talks.

A simple ‘zine folded from an A4 paper provides six small pages, including the front and back. That forces you to be to the point.

I thought of a posting I wrote a little over a year ago, about how personal knowledge management is personal in three ways, and that generally you should always take the P in PKM even more personal than you’re already doing.
Three points to bring across sounded short enough to lend itself for a message in a zine.


The P in PKM is 3 fold personal. (jouw = yours in Dutch)


First, it’s your personal system. You take it with you. It enables and anchors your personal autonomy, and allows you to own your own learning path


Second, it’s your personal knowledge, building on your own curiosity and interests, with your associations, in your language. Your personal network of meaning.


Third, it’s your personal system. Your emergent structures, following your logic, stemming from your personal methods and workflows.


Personal KM is way more personal than you think. And still more.

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I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.

One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.

Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.

Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.

Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.

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In the past few weeks I’ve been diving into the online genealogical open data that is available, triggered by a conversation with Y about some of her schoolwork that deals with ancestry and namesakes.
In parallel E did her own deep dive, with some vibe coding assistance, working her way to transform her WordPress site into a static website. This included new workflows to be able to post directly from her notes and note taking apps across multiple devices.

The contrast between the two efforts stands out to me. That contrast is the direction of the arrow of time.

It is fascinating to see the patterns from historic traces my ancestors have left behind, and the stories that emerge from them. I’ve seen wealth, poverty, crime, war, disease, entire careers in the stories spread out over 275 years and more. It is easy to loose oneself in some more data, to find if I can add one more generation further back in time to the overview. The challenge increases as you progress: every generation there’s by definition double the number of people to find (unless you stick to one particular paternal or maternal line and don’t branch out to siblings at all). Finding previously undiscovered connections gives a little kick, similar to weaving a new connection in the now. Yet it yields nothing in terms of the now. No new agency, no new perception of identity, no new capabilities moving forward, no new (creative) artefacts for others to build upon or enjoy. Despite the fascinating stories I uncovered and the more nuanced sense of my family’s history I acquired.

E’s effort, of similar duration and intensity, is way more forward looking. She reduced dependencies on dynamic tools, increased the speed of her website, and learned a lot along the way, such as using git, and automating workflows that involve her devices, her VPS and remote services. She acquired new capabilities and understanding when it comes to creating one’s own digital autonomy. Something she was already helping others with, and now has put a more solid understanding underneath. She made it easier for herself to express herself on her website, reducing the friction in getting her own stories and writings out. New confidence in executing on ideas she already had for a long time. Her side interest is forward looking, constructive, activist.

My father after his (early) retirement mostly spend time on things that were looking into the past. Genealogy in the 1990s, collecting educational resources and material from the early 1900s, the local historic society of the village he was born.

E and I have often remarked how important it is to us to have friends and connections across different age groups, not be stuck in our own cohort and/or older. I have a sense that the side interests you spend time on and their direction of perspective, their arrow of time, help determine if that is easier or harder to do.

The framing is important here too. You can look at internet technology and say you want to go ‘back’ to the way some of those tools were in the 1990s and the zeroes. Or you can say, how can I use the key affordances and principles of what worked before to create something that allows new agency, that can help construct what comes next?

I think I prefer my side interests, and have for most of my life, with the arrow of time pointing forward.

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It turns out that in my previous search for my oldest findable namesake I was barking up literally the wrong tree. I am named after my maternal grandfather (born 1903), and his paternal line has several men named Anton (my first name) in a side branch, originating from his great uncle in 1803 (and his namesake was his godfather it seems). That line however is not also the source of my (and my grandfather’s) second name Arnold.

Trying to extend the ancestral wheel for Y, at first I could not get beyond my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandparents and there were no Anton’s to be found there. His mother’s father was named Johannes (born 1835), and his mother’s maternal grandfather was named Cornelis (born 1796). Not having names of parents in turn makes it hard to find siblings. When I then found the names of Johannes’ parents, Hermanus (born 1794) and Johanna, at first that did not bring an Anton to light either.

Dutch family names have been introduced in the early 1810s under Napoleonic rule. Some families came up with something that connected to their profession, locality, or how they wanted to be adressed (I’ll call myself King, ha! Baker! ‘From Smallville’!) Some thought it would be temporary and done away with after the French rule ended, hence family names like Bornnaked. Some already had a form of family name, e.g. based on the farm they lived at.

The Hermanus born 1794 would have been too young to register a family name, and it would have been his father who did. But his father would have been born around 1750-1775, and if there was a pre-existing family name then the spelling could be fluid over several decades, especially if a family moved around between different municipalities. There also can be differences in spelling between church records and civic records. Indeed it turned out that what settled as the family name Meere, was also written down as Meré, Merée, Marré and Marre describing the same people, dates and events. I also came across Meeze several times, which is more likely a transcription error when records were digitised. That way I found both the 1794 Hermanus’ grandfather also named Hermanus, born around 1740, and a son named Anthonie Arnoldus for both of them. With the spelling of those first names, I could then search out more people with the same name.

Now I do have a clear timeline for my namesake, where previously I thought I did if a tenuous one.

Hermanus Meere (b. ca. 1740) had a son Anthonie Arnoldus (1764-1832). He named one of his sons Anthonie Arnoldus (1799-1865) His other son Hermanus (1794-1845) named one son Johannes (1835-1911), and another Anthonie Arnoldus (1837-1870). Johannes’ daughter Theodora (1864-1950) named her son Anton Arnold (1903-1969, my direct namesake), after her uncle, great uncle, and great grandfather. The spelling of the names changed here, losing their religious connotations. There is a story my mother told me that I connected to her parents, but perhaps is connected to her father’s parents given the change in spelling of names: that the couple came from different religious denominations, and that when both reverend and pastor after the wedding came asking about whether their future children would be registered as part of their flock, they decided it would be neither.

An overview of the Anthonie Arnoldus and one Anthonia Arnolda I could find: