Jan van Gooyen,*1596 – †1656
View of Dordrecht from the Dordtse Kil, 1644
Welcome!
I am pleased that you have opened my website. Here you will find a wealth of information about who I am, what I have done, what interests me and — increasingly — where I come from. Feel free to explore the menus and links and take your time. Still not enough? Then perhaps you really do want to know who I am.
As Lt. Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino) in the movie Scent of a Woman says
“There are 2 kinds of people in this world, Charlie. The first group is the people that face the music.
The second group are those who run for cover.”
“Who am I?” is an intriguing question, because it is perhaps one of the most fundamental questions we can ask ourselves. Do I belong to Frank Slade’s first or second group? You could also ask: “Where am I?” Well, first of all, I am here because I was born — my own personal “Big Bang” moment. I am also here because of a little thing called Freedom of Speech and, of course, because I am a dutiful taxpayer.
But behind the humour lies a more serious thought. Who we are is shaped not only by the choices we make in life, but also by where we were born, the family we came from and the generations that came before us. Life itself is a journey: sometimes exciting, sometimes difficult; filled with friendship and loneliness, happiness and sadness, successes and wrong turns. As I grew older, my curiosity about my own place in that journey increasingly turned towards the past. I wanted to know more than simply who I am and where I am. I wanted to understand where my family came from, how earlier generations lived and migrated, and eventually how far back those ancestral lines could be traced.
And so one question gradually became increasingly important to me:
Where do I really come from?
My name
Grotekerksbuurt, Dordrecht
Let’s start off with my name, because if I did not have a name, how could I identify myself? If I had no name, who would I be?
My name is Cees Kloosterman and my own story began on 19 September 1949, when I was born in the Kofstraat — today the Zeehavenlaan — in Dordrecht. A true “Dordtenaar”, therefore, deeply rooted in the oldest city of Holland. After many years away, I returned in 1998 to live once again in Dordrecht’s historic city centre, not far from where my journey through life began.
I grew up as an only child in a modest, socially conscious working-class family, in which curiosity about the world and an interest in history, science and society came naturally. My parents had themselves been shaped by the poverty of the Depression years and by their experiences during the Second World War. They made considerable sacrifices to give their only son opportunities they had never had themselves: a good education and the possibility of building his own future.
After primary school at De Vest, I attended the Gemeentelijk Lyceum Dordrecht (HBS-B). It was there that my broad interest in science, history and design already began to take shape. In 1966 I went to Leiden University to study Geology. I was fascinated by the history preserved in landscapes and geological layers, but eventually my curiosity about people proved stronger than my fascination with the rocks beneath their feet.
In 1967 I changed course and entered medical school at Erasmus University Rotterdam, graduating as a physician in October 1973. After two years as a medical officer in the Royal Netherlands Army and a short period working as a locum general practitioner, I specialised in Occupational and Social Medicine, a field in which I remained professionally active for many years.
Looking back, that early fascination with geology was perhaps not such a detour after all.
I had started by trying to understand the deep history of the Earth.
Many decades later, I found myself trying to reconstruct the deep history
of my own family — and ultimately of myself.
Oyster Bay, Eastern Cape, South Africa.
Medicine, Creativity and Curiosity
Medicine was an important part of my professional life for many years, but it was never my only interest. What attracted me to medicine was not simply the science itself, but also the need to observe carefully, to ask questions and to understand how things fit together. Looking back, that same curiosity has been a recurring theme throughout almost everything I have done. Alongside my medical career, my creative side continued to develop. Photography had long been an important interest, combining technical knowledge with the challenge of looking at the world differently and capturing what I saw. Later, computers opened up an entirely new field of possibilities.
I became fascinated by the rapidly developing world of information technology and, particularly, by the arrival of the internet. What began as an attempt to understand HTML and learn how websites worked soon became something much more creative. I discovered that web design brought together many of the things I enjoyed: technology, design, photography, research and communication.
Eventually, this led me to establish my own web-design company, CKWebdesign. Creating websites was never simply a technical exercise for me. I enjoyed organising large amounts of information, giving it a clear structure and combining words and images in a way that made a subject both accessible and visually attractive. In retrospect, there is a remarkable continuity between these seemingly different activities. Medicine shaped my analytical side, while photography and web design gave me a different way of looking at the world — through images, composition and visual storytelling. Those skills would prove unexpectedly valuable many years later, when genealogy, history, archaeology and DNA research came together in an entirely different kind of project.
Perhaps curiosity is the one thread connecting almost everything I have done.
Open-air (doors-off) helicopter flight – Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii.
Sport, Diving and a Sense of Adventure
Sport and adventure have always been an important part of my life. In the 1960s, I was an enthusiastic baseball player with The Hawks in Dordrecht, playing second base for two years and later spending several seasons as a catcher. I still enjoy watching the game today. But in 1979, another passion entered my life and would remain with me for decades: scuba diving. What began as a new sporting challenge soon developed into a serious and lasting commitment. I progressed to four-star CMAS level and PADI Master Scuba Diver, and for several years I served as president of OSCD, the scuba diving club in Dordrecht.
Hélène became not only my wife and travelling companion, but also my diving buddy. Together we explored an extraordinary variety of underwater worlds — from the Maldives and Mauritius to Israel, Egypt and Jordan; from the Caribbean to Thailand and Indonesia; and from Hawaii and Cuba to Bonaire, as well as the Mediterranean and our own North Sea. Our love of diving naturally became part of a much wider passion for travel and discovering the world together. Over the years we travelled extensively through the Middle East and Africa, including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and throughout Asia, visiting India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Vietnam, as well as Sarawak, the hidden treasure of Borneo.
Our journeys also took us across the Atlantic to the United States and Mexico. We visited the USA many times, particularly California, where Hélène’s sister Marion lives, but also travelled much farther across the country and to places such as Hawaii. Closer to home, we continued to explore Europe, returning regularly to countries such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and Turkey. For us, travelling was never simply about visiting another country. It was about experiencing different landscapes and cultures, meeting people, tasting unfamiliar food, discovering history and — whenever possible — adding a little adventure along the way.
Over the years those adventures included white-water rafting, including the formidable Zambezi River, hot-air ballooning over Palm Springs and the Namib Desert, ziplining in South Africa and Hawaii, flying in microlights and, for about twenty-five years, playing golf, often combining the game with our travels around the world. Yet scuba diving always remained something special. Beneath the surface was another world entirely — quiet, unfamiliar and endlessly fascinating — and exploring it together gave Hélène and me memories that have remained with us throughout our lives.
Perhaps all these journeys also reveal something about what has always driven me.
A curiosity about what lies beyond the familiar horizon.
Zeelandaricum, hhistorical map of the province
of Zeeland from 1570.
From Genealogy to DNA
Parallel to my medical and creative career, I developed an enduring fascination with history — from European prehistory and the great migrations that shaped our continent to the early civilizations of the Near East. I have always been interested not only in what happened, but also in the people behind history: how they lived, where they came from and how their lives were shaped by the world around them.
That fascination eventually brought history much closer to home. I began researching my own family and discovered how rewarding it could be to reconstruct the lives of people who were no longer simply anonymous figures from the past, but my own ancestors. Traditional genealogical research took me through archives, church registers, civil records, old photographs, maps and family documents. Step by step, I was able to trace the documented history of the Kloosterman family back to around 1550, to Biezelinge in Zeeland. Names and dates gradually became families, occupations, places and personal stories. Genealogy had become a way of giving the past a human face.
But inevitably, written records reach their limits. Beyond a certain point there are no parish registers, notarial deeds or other documents waiting to be discovered. For a long time, that seemed to mark the boundary beyond which a personal family history simply could not be followed. Then DNA changed the perspective completely. Over the years my curiosity began to reach beyond the limits of written history. I became increasingly fascinated by the deeper layers of human origins and by the rapidly developing field of archaeogenetics. Ancient DNA was beginning to reveal something that traditional genealogy alone could never show: the movements and relationships of human populations across hundreds, thousands and eventually tens of thousands of years.
Suddenly, the question was no longer simply: Who were my documented ancestors? It became something much larger: Where did my ancestral lines come from before written history began? That journey into the distant past did not begin in a laboratory or at an archaeological site. It began here, in Dordrecht. Here, in the same city where my own life began, I found myself asking that deceptively simple question again:
Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), ca. 10.000–5.000 BCE.
Where do we really come from?
Modern DNA research opened an entirely new window onto the past. Through extensive genetic analysis, including Big Y testing through FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA) in Houston, Texas, I began exploring my paternal Y-DNA line in increasingly fine detail. At the same time, mitochondrial DNA offered a second perspective through the maternal line, while autosomal DNA provided another layer of information about my broader genetic ancestry. But DNA results by themselves are only part of the story. What fascinated me most was the possibility of bringing different disciplines together. By comparing my own genetic results with published ancient-DNA datasets, archaeological discoveries, historical sources, migration patterns and traditional genealogy, it became possible to place those ancestral lines within a much broader geographical and historical framework.
The trail gradually led far beyond Zeeland and the Netherlands. It reached back through medieval Europe and the great movements of peoples across the continent, through the Longobards, Bronze Age communities and the Tollense Valley, and farther still into the world of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the earliest Homo sapiens populations of Europe. At the centre of this investigation are two ancient ancestral lines: my paternal Y-DNA line I-FGC15105 and my maternal mtDNA line H1c1k. Following these two lines through time and geography gradually transformed what had begun as conventional family genealogy into something much larger.
The more I discovered, the clearer it became that family history does not begin with the first surviving document bearing a family name. Behind every documented ancestor lie countless generations of people who migrated, adapted, survived and passed part of their genetic heritage to the generations that followed. What began with names in old Zeeland records had therefore become a journey through more than 50,000 years of human history. These discoveries eventually grew into an extensive research project in which genealogy, archaeology, genetics and history converge.
The result is EUROPE IN DNA — my attempt to connect the documented history
of one family with the much deeper story written in our DNA.
Reconstruction of Dutch emigrants leaving for America aboard a Red Star Line steamship, late nineteenth century.
From Zeeland to America
And the story of the Kloosterman family did not remain confined to Zeeland — or even to Europe. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the wider family left the Netherlands for America, joining the millions of Europeans who sought new opportunities and a new future on the other side of the Atlantic.
These were no longer anonymous migrations reconstructed from ancient DNA or archaeological remains. These were real people whose names we know, whose family relationships can be documented and whose journeys can be followed through historical records. They left behind the familiar landscape of Zeeland and the Netherlands and began a new chapter of the family story in a very different world. Their descendants became part of American society, while their genealogical roots remained firmly connected to the family in the Netherlands.
Many Dutch emigrants initially settled in the Great Lakes region, particularly in Michigan. Religious motives played an important part in this movement, but so did the availability of farmland and the opportunity to build an independent life. For emigrants from Zeeland, this new agricultural world must in some respects have felt surprisingly familiar. Once again, life was shaped by the land and the seasons, with crops such as potatoes and onions that they also knew from their native region.
Nor did migration necessarily end there. From these first Dutch settlements, families and later generations moved farther across the American continent, into other parts of the Midwest and eventually as far as California. What began as emigration from a small province on the North Sea thus became part of a much wider story of movement, settlement and new beginnings across America.
Their story forms a fascinating continuation of the much older migrations described in EUROPE IN DNA. For tens of thousands of years, my ancestors had moved across Europe — from the earliest Homo sapiens, through Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Bronze Age communities to medieval populations, eventually reaching the Low Countries. Centuries later, branches of the documented Kloosterman family continued that age-old human pattern of migration, this time leaving Europe for a new continent.
There is something remarkable about that continuity. The earliest journeys can only be reconstructed through archaeology and DNA. Later generations emerge from medieval documents and genealogical records. And eventually we arrive at individuals whose names, families and journeys can be followed in detail through historical sources.
What began in the distant past as the movement of human populations across a continent thus becomes, in the documented history of my own family, a very personal story. In that sense, my DNA research feels less like a new interest discovered late in life than the natural outcome of a lifetime in which curiosity, science, creativity and the urge to explore have always played a central role.
- Medicine taught me to ask questions.
- Travel taught me how large the world is.
- History taught me how much came before us.
- And DNA unexpectedly brought all of these things together.
Facing the Music
Looking back at my childhood, I was shy in expressing myself and sometimes rather afraid of the problems that seemed to loom ahead socially. Returning to Frank Slade’s (Al Pacino) words, I would probably have belonged to his second group of people — those who run for cover. It took me quite some time to throw away the chains of that past. But somewhere along the way I learned not to be afraid of storms — or of the music, remembering that everyone listens to a different band anyway.
I learned, quite simply, to sail my own ship.
Perhaps all those journeys — through medicine and family life, through travel, the air and beneath the sea, through history and genealogy and ultimately through my own DNA — have contributed to the person I am today. So now I have arrived in Lt. Col. Frank Slade’s first group of people: those who face the music. And what is more important: I enjoy it.
And perhaps, after all these years of asking Who am I? and Where do I come from?,
that is as good an answer as any.
Cees Kloosterman
Dordrecht, 2026
“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
– W. Louisa May Alcott –
