Not Like Everybody Else. Essays in Honor of Kees Mandemakers

e-ISSN: 2352-6343 DOI article: https://doi.org/10.51964/hlcs9556 The article can be downloaded from here. © 2021, Kok, Bras, Zijdeman This open-access work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.


If you all want me to settle down Slow up and stop all my running 'round
A lifelong devotee of The Kinks, Kees Mandemakers is undoubtedly familiar with their song 'I'm not like everybody else ' (1967). The rebellious spirit of the song must have resonated with Kees' own early revolt against the strictures of religion, as he fondly recounts his discussions with the church minister trying to teach him catechism. Although he can be quite headstrong, Kees is not the type to protest for the sake of protest, in fact, he turned out be a 'rebel with a cause'. He devoted his career to the cause of supporting social history in its broadest sense with state-of-the art databases. This required rebelliousness but most of all perseverance. For the past thirty-odd years, Kees soldiered on in the face of a growing disdain for quantitative history. He weathered periods with, at best, lukewarm institutional support for his enterprises and limited financial sponsoring. In other periods, he resisted exaggerated faith in innovate techniques in database construction.
The focus of Kees' professional attention was the reconstruction of Dutch life courses and families in order to create an infrastructure for social science history. First and foremost, this entailed building the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, which is flanked by dozens of side-projects. Since 1989, Kees devoted all his time and energy to create, disseminate, enrich and expand the HSN, which by 2020 had resulted in no less than 412 scientific publications and 802 lectures and presentations (Annual Report 2019).
HSN is not completed. Actually, it is not even intended to be completed and then stored away in some data archive. The more than 80,000 individual life courses in HSN will be enriched with further data on networks, income, education, as well as with the life courses of offspring, which will allow for audacious explorations in social science history. But even more ambitious than HSN is the LINKS project that Kees embarked on some fifteen years ago. This project implies the complete reconstitution of all Dutch families in the 19th and early 20th century by linking all public civil records. For several provinces, the task is already completed.
From the start, Kees has put his Dutch databases squarely in an international network of similar initiatives. These initiatives inspired him and, conversely, his experiences found their way in the form of advice and papers on 'best practices' to database builders abroad. A crucial step in strengthening international collaboration was the Intermediate Data Structure, an identical output format for all historical databases. To construct and promote this format, Kees and others founded the European Historical Population Samples Network as well as the open access journal Historical Life Course Studies.
We cannot do full justice here to Kees' advice and support for many projects in several countries, his own research activities, his professorship at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and so on. But our appreciation for his work, support and friendship is profound. We hope to express our appreciation in this collection of short essays, that all have a direct bearing on Kees' professional mission.
Obviously, the creation of research infrastructures plays a large role in this special issue. New quality standards and future prospects of historical databases in general are discussed in the essays by Lionel Kesztenbaum that even a 'high fertility' region had couples very different demographic profiles. Niels van den Berg, Ingrid van Dijk and Rick Mourits demonstrate that fertility of daughters of older mothers is reduced.
Work and education are important domains of the life course, and have always had Kees Mandemakers warmest interest. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk discusses schooling in the Netherlands and Java between 1800 and 1940, reflecting Kees' own interest in education. Björn Quanjer and Kristina Thompson take an un unusual approach as they explore the shifting relation between education and obesity with conscript records. Corinne Boter uses the marriage certificates of LINKS and shows how regional differences in industrialization rather than social norms affect women's labour force participation. Three essays may have some bearing on Kees Mandemaker's own history and life course. Stemming from an Orthodox Protestant family more or less on the frontier between 'Rome and Reformation', he will enjoy Hans Knippenberg's essay on the rise of Pillarization ('Verzuiling'). Ineke Maas, Marco van Leeuwen and Antonie Knigge look at the recruitment of university professors in the past and note the closed character of this occupation. For Kees, we can safely say that he reached this position on his own merits. Finally, Anders Brändström and Glenn Sandström study recent developments in retirement.
Kees Mandemakers may have stopped 'running 'round' and appears to have 'settled down' comfortably in Utrecht city. But we hope that, intellectually, he will never settle down but will keep on giving advice, writing history, and exploring new venues. Like every individual, Kees' life course is part and parcel of general societal processes, which translate to the micro-level in class-, gender-, age-and cohort-specific ways. But we are more than the sum of the variables determining our life course trajectories. With regard to Kees: his steadfast devotion, energy, relentless enthusiasm, and singular capacities make him, at least to us, truly unique, or in other words: Not Like Everybody Else.