Dutch and Belgian Coat of Arms from the Muschart...

Quote:

I am researching Dutch and Belgian coat of arms belonging to my family
on my mother's side. The Muschart Heraldry Collection at the Central
Bureau of Genealogie in the The Hague has it there only on microfilm.
You can access a snipet of a description over the internet at
CBG.nl . You have to go there in person to get a photocopy of the
full description and source. The actual collection was moved to South
Africa and from the website that no longer looks operational and out
of date gives no response!

Does anyone know what happened to the collection? Has it ever been
converted into a book or a CDrom that is for purchase?

The website page still up leaves this story on how the collection came
to be in South Africa!

The Muschart manuscript

by F G Brownell

TWENTY years ago, the Bureau of Heraldry was fortunate enough to be
able to purchase the manuscript of the Muschart Collection of
Netherlands coats of arms, which in index card form reposes in the
Central Bureau voor Genealogie, in The Hague.

This manuscript is undoubtedly the finest reference source to the
coats of arms of Netherlanders, outside the Netherlands and, arguably,
is in certain respects even more complete than the original, in that
it also includes subsequent additions by Muschart’s friend and later
owner of the manuscript, Dr A R Kleyn.

Because of South Africa’s genealogical links with the Netherlands,
which now extend back 350 years, to the establishment in 1652 of a
refreshment station at the Cape, by the Dutch East India Company, it
is appropriate that this important manuscript should have found its
way to South Africa, to form part of our cultural heritage.

For this we must thank the late Cor Pama himself a Netherlander by
birth, and for many years a leading figure in the South African
heraldic fraternity. Apart from being the longest serving member of
the Heraldry Council, a body on which he sat from 1963-1990, he was
also a leading member of the Heraldry Society, from the time of his
arrival in South Africa in the mid-1950s, until his death 40 years
later.

The compilation of the Muschart Collection was a labour of love, which
spanned more than half a century. Rudolphe Theodore Muschart
(1873-1955) became enthralled by heraldry at the very beginning of the
20th century, and remained true to this love for the remainder of his
life.

As Muschart explained in a letter written in 1948, to the Jonkheer C C
van Valkenburg (a member of the management council of the Centraal
Bureau voor Heraldiek from 1955 until his death in 1984), he threw
himself, heart and soul, into his study of and research into heraldry,
following a failed love affair at the age of 27. In his love for
heraldry, he found compensation for that other lost love.

Muschart was born on 23 September 1873 at Breda the son of an infantry
officer who later rose to the rank of lieutenant-general. He joined
the Royal Netherlands Navy at the age of 16 and, following training as
an officer, was appointed a midshipman in 1893. He was promoted to sub-
lieutenant in 1897. After serving for some time in the Far East, he
left the Navy in 1903. He found that life as a young naval officer
offered few challenges.

In December 1903, Muschart joined the Rotterdam office of the
Netherlands-American Steamship Company as an Assistant Inspector and
two years later became an Inspector to the Holland-American Line,
which he served until 1916. For the following two years he served as
inspector in the Netherlands Overseas Trust Company, which was to
suffer considerably from the German U-boat onslaught during the First
World War, and went into liquidation after the war.

By that stage, Muschart had already investigated opportunities
elsewhere and on 1 February 1919, was appointed Harbourmaster of
Rotterdam. His official title was “rijkshavermeester van de
Rotterdamschen Waterweg en van Rotterdam”. He occupied this post until
his retirement on 1 February 1930, following the reorganisation of the
Harbour Service in the Netherlands. He was then 54 years of age and
moved to Arnhem.

In 1947 Muscharts’s collection of some 150 000 index cards reflecting
the Netherlands “family” (personal) coats of arms and attendant
genealogical notes which he had collected over almost half a century,
were purchased by the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie. A condition of
the sale was, however, that the collection would remain with Muschart
until his death.

Although he initially used J B Rietstap’s Armorial Général as a
source, Muschart undertook an enormous amount of research to discover
and record the provenance of the coats of arms, which he recorded. In
most cases giving valuable information as to whom had borne the arms
and when they were borne, together with the source of his information.
His information is thus far more comprehensive than that recorded by
Rietstap. In 1912 Muschart became a member of the genealogical and
heraldic society De Nederlandsche Leeuw, which provided him with
access to another important source of research material.

During his time as harbourmaster of Rotterdam, Muschart’s onerous
official duties left him little time for extensive research. He
nevertheless worked actively on his collection and it is obvious that
he was by then already compiling the manuscript which he later hoped
to publish. A considerable amount of the material in this manuscript
is written on the back of old tide charts of the Rotterdam harbour,
which he had cut up for this purpose. After moving to the pleasant
surroundings of Arnhem, he took up his research again with enthusiasm,
unhindered by the irritations of officialdom, which he had previously
suffered.

Although his collection survived undamaged in the depot of the
Rijksarchief in Arnhem, Muschart lost his beloved library in the
Battle of Arnhem in 1944. He retrieved his collection after the
termination of hostilities and was able to continue with this love of
his life. As the culmination of his heraldic activities, Muschart
hoped to publish a “new Rietstap” of the Netherlands coats of arms,
which he had been researching since the turn of the century.

It is not known when Muschart commenced with the preparation of his
manuscript, but certainly by 1944 he was in discussion with the
publisher A A M Stols, of The Hague. Production costs would have been
prohibitive and the discussions came to naught.

One can hardly imagine how much work must have gone into its
preparation, and Muschart’s disappointment, which he expressed in a
letter to Jonkheer E A van Beresteyn, then head of the Centraal Bureau
voor Genealogie, where he wrote: “Het spijt my heel erg, dat mijn
levenswerk het levenslicht niet zal mogen zien”.

After the war, Muschart revised and rewrote the manuscript, which in
its final form comprised no fewer than 14 248 pages. He completed this
mammoth task on 20 November 1947.

Jonkheer van Beresteyn had endeavoured to purchase the Manuscript for
the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in 1946, and Jonkheer van
Valkenburg tried again in 1955, but Muschart had already arranged for
it to pass to the genealogist and heraldist, Dr A R Kleyn of Zeist,
who had hopes of arranging for its publication.

Muschart died in Arnhem on 14 November 1955. Kleyn was unsuccessful in
arranging for publication, but made additions to the text. In this
regard the manuscript is probably more comprehensive than the original
collection, held by the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague.

After Dr Kleyn’s death in 1979, the manuscript passed to his widow
who, apparently unsuccessful in finding a buyer in the Netherlands,
offered it to Cornelis Pama, an old friend, and member of the Heraldry
Council in South Africa. Pama, in turn, brought the availability of
the manuscript to the notice of the Bureau of Heraldry. As it
happened, there were funds available for the purchase of “cultural
treasures” on the budget of the South African Department of National
Education, and the manuscript was soon bought and shipped to South
Africa.

Cor Pama mentioned to the writer afterwards that there was
considerable unhappiness in the Netherlands about the sale of the
Muschart manuscript to South Africa, and that there were attempts to
prevent its export, but that these were made too late. So it was that
the Bureau of Heraldry was able to acquire what is in essence a
priceless manuscript, which is consulted on a regular basis.

The Muschart Collection itself may be consulted on microfiche in the
reading room of the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague,
while the original cards are kept safely in cabinets. The writer was
able to view parts of the collection while on a visit to the Centraal
Bureau in 1984.

After Muschart’s death his collection revealed that it was Marie
Adriana Schout Velthuis who had declared her love for him on 1 April
1900, but who in October of the same year terminated their
relationship “thereby leaving him always broken”. It is fortunate that
out of this lost love, there grew another, of far greater permanence,
which ultimately and unquestionably inspired the most significant
contribution to Netherlands heraldry in the 20th century.

Footnote:

Although Rudolphe Theodore Muschart was a prolific correspondent,
comparatively little had been published on his life and work. Only in
the year 2000 was this shortcoming addressed by Rob van Drie and A G
van der Steur, in an article titled “De liefde zij’t beginsel, de orde
zij de grondslag an de vooruitgang het doel”, which was published in
the Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, 2000, pp113 ff.

Although the words chosen as the title of the article on Muschart
cannot be found in the manuscript in the Bureau of Heraldry, they are
quoted in a letter by Muschart to Jonkheer van Valkenburg dated 26
September 1948, as having been written in his own hand, in the
introduction to his “new Armorial”. The previous day, 25 September,
would he wrote, have been the birthday of his great love. Although he
did not mention Maria Adriana by name, it is clear that her memory was
still an integral part of Muschart’s whole being, and the abiding
inspiration for his heraldic work.