Bruno Otto Adriaan Johan Thomas Joan van Voorthuijsen

BOAJThJ or 'BOA' for short is perhaps the most intriguing of our immediate ancestors,for he had numerous offspring.

The entire Dutch East Indies branch of the Van Voorthuijsen family came from him and his wife Antje, for his elder brother Joan Raimond Leon died childless. Born in Padang on the West Central Sumatra (Indian Ocean) coast he was just a young boy when his father Joan, one of the two Directors of the Netherlands Trading Society in Batavia, drowned off the coast of Semarang (NorthCentral Java) in 1972. I was told that Bruno started his career working for the Koninklijke Java-China Paketvaartlijn. He was introduced to Antje Cesarine Toeteman on the tea plantation of the Byrne family (originally from South Africa). Antje's father was an Austrian/Croation (the name Toeteman or Tudjeman probably means Deutschman or Dutchman) and her mother was from a Chinese family of Batavia by the name of Chang. Bruno obviously inherited some money, did well for himself in business, but lost his money in a crash. One of his less successful enterprises was to import Frisian cattle to Batavia. The cattle failed to thrive in the hot and humid climate of Java. I was told that his property in Batavia later was bought by the British Club. Because of his wife's Austrian father, Bruno became very good friends with his neighbor, who was the Austrian Consul, who gave him a set of silver napkin rings at one time which were in the family till recently. My grandfather Otto, the eldest sibling in his family was only 14 when his father died. It must have been quite traumatic again....and obviously must have left quite e few emotional scars.

One interesting literary tid bit is that in Bruno's time the French poet Arthur Rimbaud visited Batavia, but then jumped ship there and returned to Europe. There is also a chapter in Eugene Sue's novel Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew) concerning an important character in the book who lived in Java around that time, I think closer to Cheribon--where in fact another great grandfather, Richard Henry Cooke III had a tobacco plantation.