My grandmother Agnes Lilly loved to talk about her past. And I loved to listen. To salt the conversation, I would often show her an old photograph, and the selected image is one she loved.
The featured photograph shows American and Dutch branches of Family van Panthaleon van Eck who are gathered at Scheveningen, The Hague on June 30, 1924 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of my grandparents’s wedding, that is, the tenth anniversary of youngest brother Jan Carel van Panthaleon van Eck’s marriage to his San Francisco bride Agnes Lilly Tillmann van Eck.
Nine (9) van Eck siblings are shown with families, and these siblings are the second generation of “van Panthaleon” van Ecks. Their father Francois was the first van Eck to petition the proper authorities to append “van Panthaleon” to the family name.
The “van Panthaleon” argument was based on ancient chronicles of the van Eck family, which claimed that our family descends from a 13th century knight by the name Bartholt van Panthaleon, who was appointed the first “heer” of the village Eck in return for services. “Van Panthaleon” identified Sir Bartholt as a member of Cologne’s Panthaleon family, one of fifteen Equestrian families sent by the Roman Emperor Trajan to settle in Cologne about 100 A.D.
The parents are gone, but surviving siblings are (in order of birth): Fanny (1865); Reinier (1866); Wilkine (1868); Francois (1870); Henriette (1872); Bartholt (1873); Louisa (1877); Jan Ferdinand (1878); Jan Carel (1880).
To celebrate their milestone anniversary my grandmother orchestrated a summer gathering of van Panthaleon van Ecks at Scheveningen near The Hague in Holland. In their separate life stories, my grandparents both described the family gathering as follows:
“Three months later [June 1924] all of us took the S.S. Niewe Amsterdam to Holland where we spent the summer and had the celebration of our twelfth [?, tenth!] wedding anniversary with the van Panthaleon [van Eck] family.”
Agnes van Eck, unpublished Stories for Grandchildren, 1970s
“For the winter of 1923-1924 we found an apartment at 960 Park Avenue which we occupied also the following winter. In 1924 at that apartment was born our beloved son Bart Reiner. He was hardly a few months old when the whole of our family went to Holland to spend the summer of 1924. We had a lovely time there and engaged a young lady to help and to teach the children some Dutch. When we left for America the young lady spoke a very nice English but the children no Dutch!!”
J.C. van Eck, unpublished Reminiscences, 1950s
What makes the featured image super-special are the “liner notes”, that is, my grandmother’s handwritten jottings on a cardboard wrap noting what, where, when, and who. Now, here!