Re: BOEKENKAMP; DEU; 1836- On 23 Sep 1999 11:01:19 GMT, Herma Gumpert <[email protected]> wrote: Herma, Please realise that is better to use the correct name for your country (and mine): the Netherlands. For others who do not know that: 'Holland' is only the western part of it, around Amsterdam and Rotterdam. There are just two provinces with that name: North and South Holland. Calling the Netherlands 'Holland' is equivalent to calling everyone in the USA a "New Yorker' or everyone in Germany a Bavarian. Such a thing is a 'pars pro toto' (the part is used instead of the whole). So 'Holland' and Germany are not close together ;-) Some hundreds of years ago, there were only dialects, which varied slightly from place to place. There were no official 'Dutch' or 'German' languages as we know them now. 'Boekenkamp' sounds like an old East-Netherlands name to me, or possibly a West-German one. I suppose that the part 'boeken' was pronounced as the Dutch word 'beuken', which means in english: 'beech tree'. Then 'kamp'. In the east of the Netherlands 'kamp' meant a piece of farmland, used for crops (not a meadow).The word is still used in many dialects. So I think, "Boekenkamp' means a piece of land (partly) surrouded by beech trees. In the east of the Netherlands, some centuries ago farmland was surrounded by fences or bushes (Dutch: houtwallen) to protect the crops from cattle. To the contrary, the meadows had no fences and cattle was garded by shepherds and little children. Probably, the Boekenkamp family started out by building a house on or right next to farmland with beech trees around it. Frans. [email protected] (Frans L. Scholten)