about Farwerck

Somebody else was digging into his family history and found a photo of his grandfather as a driver. The licence plate led him to Farwerck, found this website and he contacted me. Thanks to historic archives, we therefor have a photo of Farwerck’s car! The number on the left is “5484”. The image comes from the archives of South Holland, which -at the time- had licence plates starting with a G. Great find! The registration was made on 9 September 1914. At the time, a license plate was registered, not a car, so Farwerck kept his plate when he bought other cars. The car can’t be from 1914. It appears to be a Mercedes Benz Typ Nürburg Cabriolet D (W08) (1) A model which has been produced between 1928 and 1934. Or perhaps a somewhat earlier model: It must have been huge and expensive car when I see what models Mercedes had in these days. For some reason the address has been edited from Emmastraat 58 to 60. All the way to the right it seems to say: “duplicate 29/6-’49”. Perhaps that refers to the initial registration of Franz’ first car. I haven’t been able to find that record. The… Read More »Farwerck’s car

After his political and Masonic careers were over and he was no longer a “Rotarian“, Farwerck did not sit still. He kept lecturing until very late in his life. Since some of these lectures were announced in newspapers, I can give you an idea what he lectured about and when. It appears that after World War II he found ‘new’ homes in an archaeological and a genealogical group (or at least, he wasn’t thrown out of them).

Some biographies of Farwerck mention that he travelled for work. My first thought was that he combined business with pleasure and took the opportunity to travel to places to take photos for his books. This proved to be not true. All photos that he used in books and lists as having been made himself, are taken in the Netherlands. He does use photos of other countries but these are either taken from other works or sent to him by correspondents. So or did he not travel as much as suggested?

Several years ago I visited the Dutch Royal Library for a few of my investigations, one being Farwerck. The Royal Library has most of Farwerck’s publications, including the smaller books that I’ve never found for my own library. Also it contains correspondence between Willy Farwerck and Georges Zorab, but most interestingly, the catalogue of the auction of Farwerck’s library (or so I thought) on May 25th and 26th 1971, three years after he passed away.