Reading Time: 9 minutes
In this post I am showing how I super imposed a Dutch local map from 1609 on the current 2026 map. I will also talk about the well known Dutch surveyor who measured the property in 1609 and the family who owned it in the age of the great painters, scientists and discoverers. I really enjoyed this bit of research. I hope you enjoy this not very cycling related story.
Many years ago, on June 24, 2008 to be precise, I stumbled on a website that showed an image carrousel with maps. As I was watching images rolling by, I noticed a map from the area in the Netherlands where I grew up, from 1609. The two images of the 1609 map showed parcels of land, a farm and an orchard and many narrow canals. I took some screenshots of the map and stored them on my hard drive ‘for later’.
That ‘for later’ was finally Christmas 2025, 17 years later, when I was going through my hard drive and thought I should really learn more about that map.
When I zoomed in on the screenshots I could not read the handwritten text, so I set out to find the hi res scans on line ‘somewhere’. I started searching for old maps, eventually found similar looking maps with a name of a surveyor and after searching for the surveyors name, found the maps again as high resolution scans. They are in possession of the Allard Pierson museum, the archeology museum of the University of Amsterdam.
After I downloaded the two maps, I was able to read the medieval text on the maps and figure out who ordered the maps, who made the maps and why.
Jan Pietersz Dou: medieval surveyor
I learned from the ‘cartouche‘ on the map that the Hoogeveen family descendants wanted to have the land surveyed. They approached a certain Jan Pieterszoon Dou (1572 – 1635), a surveyor from the City of Leiden. He was highly respected for his work. Not only was he a well known surveyor, he was also appointed to measure the city’s wine barrels contents, in order to calculate the wine taxes.
His fame didn’t protect him though, as he was in trouble for a few days in 1620 because of an accusation of collecting money for the (warning: rabbit hole!) Remonstrants, a more liberal Protestant denomination; Prince Maurits of Orange was siding with the Contra Remonstrants, so that became a bit iffy. He was threatened with a 1100 guilders fine, losing his position and being banned from Leiden for life. Fortunately for him, Prince Maurits loved his maps and stepped in.
In 1623 he was arrested again, ended up in jail and was accused of a conspiracy against the Prince. Once again, after a month in jail, he was saved by the Prince after explaining that a certain visit to Zoetermeer regarding a peat lands purchase had nothing to do with the conspiracy. He was released but had to pay 2000 guilders this time. As a comparison, his lavish four day wedding had costed him 300 guilders. He died of the plague in Leiden 12 years later, at the age of 63.
Gerrit and Aefgen: landowners in Rodenrijs
As I attempt to read the long winded text that is written on the map by Mr. Dou himself, I discovered that the farm and the land was owned by Aefgen (Evaa) Aelbrechts van Quackenbosch, the widow of Gerrit Ameliszn van Hoogeveen. Aefgen van Quackenbosch passed away in 1608, one year before the survey was done, so that survey request in 1609 makes sense. Her husband had passed away 25 years earlier in 1583 at the age of 56.
You might think he was just another poor farmer, eaking out a living in the Dutch clay, but the opposite is true. He had been the pensionary (a leading legal official in the Dutch Republic at that time) of the City of Leiden since 1564 and before that a lawyer at the Court of Holland. In 1575 van Hoogeveen was also named one of the first, if not the first (it is not entirely clear to me yet), curator of Leiden University. On behalf of Prince William of Orange, he took care of the financial and legal development of the new university.
William of Orange, a German prince turned protestant who was educated at the court of the catholic Spanish King Charles the Fifth, lead the revolt against the Spanish and had donated a university to Leiden (the ‘Academia Lugduno Batava‘), presumably for resisting the Spanish in the eighty year war, which was only in its seventh year by then.
Finding the exact location of the 1609 map
The next step I wanted to take was creating an overlay on a current map of the area to understand where exactly that land was. My initial idea was to create several layers in GIMP (an open source equivalent of Adobe Photoshop) and resize the images and make them semi transparent, but that would a be lot of work. Then I realised that QGIS could probably do that too, being an incredible open source mapping tool (and so much more) but with a fairly steep learning curve.
Indeed, QGIS has a plugin that makes the process really easy. Basically, what I needed to do was clicking on an intersection or a landmark, visible both in the historic and the current map, open in QGIS, and then click on the exact same spot in the historic map. What you’re doing is adding coordinates to the historic map. The software will eventually stretch and reorient the old map exactly on top of the current map.
But there was a bit of a problem, because there weren’t too many reference points in the historic 1609 map that are still in the current maps.
The 1712 Delfland map
So I set out to find another map from a later era, that might still have some more reference points from the 1609 map. And lo and behold, I learned that in 1701, the Delfland (a low laying area around the town of Delft) water management board had phenomenal maps made. The 25 separate maps are highly regarded as top maps for that time, created over a period of ten years by the brothers Nicolas and Jacobus Kruik, also know as Cruquius, and published in 1712. Giving your name a Latin flavour (not a translation) was not uncommon, similar to me calling myself Hans Bikeius.
Another problem: I could not download the 1712 interactive Cruquius map nr. 24 from the University of Delft website. I sent a quick email to their library and two days later I received an email back explaining where I could find the original files. They are now all part of the HEK (Hans en Eva Kok) collection and stored at the Dutch National Archives. I found a treasure trove of historic maps.
Now I was able to compare the 1609 map with the later 1712 map. The 1712 map has several more reference points, such as a small diagonal waterway, that really stands out, the orchard and a few more little canals that were visible on both old maps but don’t exist anymore. And there were the windmills of course built where several water bodies and roads come together and still do. I could use the windmills as a reference between the 1712 map and the OSM map.
With the help of that 1712 ‘in between’ map, I could now better pinpoint where the old farm and the orchard used to be. It is not a great story: when I overlaid the 1609 map on the current OpenStreetMap in QGIS, I found that a brand new highway (2025), quite literally runs through the backyard of the former Hoogeboom farm.
Visiting the museum in Amsterdam
In April, when I visited the Netherlands, I contacted the Allard Pierson museum in Amsterdam requesting if I could see the maps. And I was invited to drop by. I met Pieter Kuiper, who retrieved the two maps, and together we admired the maps, made of animal skin. It was very special that I could hold the same maps J.P. Dou was holding over 400 years ago.
Visiting the farm’s site
The farm is long gone. But I wanted to take a look where it used to be, just out of curiosity, so I decided to bike by. Since I left the area 30 years ago, numerous new walk and bike connections were built, one of them going right across the area where the farm used to be.
Coincidentally, my grandfather’s greenhouses in the 1930’s (in which I actually worked a little bit in the early 1970’s) were just west of the land surveyed on the 1609 map. I know now from that map that in 1609, the land my grandfather owned 300 years later was once owned by Claes Gabrielszn in 1609. In the Catholic Church registers of the mid 1650’s a certain Claes Gabrielszn from Berkel appears as a witness at a number of baptisms.
The land at that time in that area was measured in Delflandse morgens, pretty much equivalent to the Rijnlandse morgens. Mr Hoogeboom’s land was 35 morgens and 221 roeden. A morgen was 8515 m2 and a roede was 3.767 meters. In total, the area measured by Dou was around 30 hectares or 73 acres, roughly equivalent -for those who are from Ottawa- to LeBreton Flats. For those from Amsterdam, it is an area between the Allard Pierson Museum and Central Station, between Dam and Rokin on one side and Oudezijds Achterburgwal on the other side.
If you look at the bottom part of the property on the old maps, you see a bit of a wiggly line. That is a low dike (called a landscheiding) that divided two regional water management boards: the Delfland one and the Schieland one. It is still there and you can see it on the photo below. As a high school student I cycled there often, blissfully unware of the history of the area.
Sources:
The story of Jan Pieterszn Dou:
Instruction for georeferencing historic maps in QGIS:
Remove the black areas around a tilted image in QGIS:
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