Leonie van Son

Properties2
tagsperson, dutch, colonial, woman, 19th-century, 20th-century, achehnese, colonial-family
aliasesLeonie Brewer-van Son, Leonie van Son Brewer, mevrouw Brewer, wife of Otto Louis Brewer

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Leonie van Son (born Palembang (Sumatra), July 1877; died Koeta Radja (Atjeh, Sumatra), 17 November 1904) was a Dutch colonial woman of the Van Son family — daughter of L. D. M. van Son, retired captain of the K.N.I.L., and Carolina Weynschenk — who, as the first wife of Otto Louis Brewer, titular major-general of artillery, K.N.I.L., lived with her husband in Groot-Atjeh in the early years of the twentieth century and died at Koeta Radja in 1904, in the immediate aftermath of the formal close of the Atjeh-oorlog. Her death at Koeta Radja, recorded in the family genealogy with the explicit topographic gloss “Koeta Radja (Atjeh, Sumatra),” makes her one of the rare documented Dutch colonial wives of the immediate post-war Atjeh garrison-town.

Birth and family

Leonie was born at Palembang on Sumatra in July 1877, the second child of Livinus Diederik Mattheus van Son and Carolina Weynschenk. At the time of her birth, her father — a veteran of the first and second Aceh expeditions — was serving as an infantry officer in the residency of Palembang. She was thus born into a colonial military family whose Atjeh connections were already a generation old.

Marriage (1899)

Leonie married at Salatiga (Java) on 26 June 1899 Otto Louis Brewer, then a young artillery officer of the K.N.I.L., son of Adriaan Anton Wilhelm Brewer, Consul of Spain at Batavia, and Wilhelmina Sarah Christina Neuwenhuyzen. The marriage joined the Van Son military family to the colonial patriciate of the Brewers of Batavia.

Children and the Atjeh years

Of Leonie’s marriage to Otto Louis Brewer two children are documented in the family genealogy:

  1. Maximilaan Diederik Brewer — born at Djocjacarta (Java) on 18 February 1901.
  2. Yvonne Caroline Brewer — born at Indrapoera (groot Atjeh) on 1 Augustus 1904.

The places of birth of the two children fix the Brewer household’s movements: Djocjacarta in 1901, Groot-Atjeh in 1904. The posting to Indrapoera — a place within the Groot-Atjeh heartland of the sultanate — must have occurred between these dates, in the years immediately preceding the formal close of the Atjeh-oorlog in 1903 and the subsequent transition from military to civil administration in 1904. Leonie’s residence at Indrapoera and Koeta Radja in 1904 makes her one of the few documented Dutch wives of the early civil-administration period of Groot-Atjeh.

Death at Koeta Radja (17 November 1904)

The family genealogy records Leonie’s death with the precise topographic identification: “overleden te Koeta Radja (Atjeh, Sumatra) 17 November 1904” — “died at Koeta Radja (Atjeh, Sumatra) 17 November 1904.” She was twenty-seven years old. Her daughter Yvonne was three and a half months old at the time of her mother’s death. The cause of death is not recorded.

The death at Koeta Radja, in the same year as the birth at Indrapoera, fixes the Brewer household in the Groot-Atjeh theatre of the colonial occupation in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century — the very moment of the formal transition from military to civil administration in Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden. The early colonial garrison-town of Koeta Radja, in this period, was a place of high European mortality — from “Atjeh fever” (Atjeh-koorts), cholera, and the residual hazards of an incompletely pacified countryside.

Aftermath and the second marriage of her husband

After Leonie’s death, Otto Louis Brewer married, at [‘s-Gravenhage|‘s-Gravenhage]] on 27 October 1908, her younger sister Adeline van Son (born Palembang, 10 October 1878) — a marriage within the prohibited degrees. The Van Son genealogy records no children of this second marriage.

Significance

Leonie van Son’s significance for the encyclopedia of Achehnese history lies principally in the documentary fact of her death and her daughter’s birth in Groot-Atjeh in 1904. The combined record — a daughter born at Indrapoera in August, a mother dead at Koeta Radja in November — fixes a Dutch colonial family in the Atjeh garrison-town in the exact year of the transition from military to civil administration, and it documents the continuing European mortality of the early colonial town. Her case is, in microcosm, a document of the colonial-family dimension of the Atjeh occupation: the wife of a serving K.N.I.L. artillery officer, dead at twenty-seven in the colonial seat of a province her father-in-law had helped to conquer thirty years earlier.

See Also

Source

Geschiedenis en genealogie van het geslacht Van Son, eertijds geheeten Van Broechoven, by H. J. A. van Son, Deel III: De Oudere Linie (Vervolg tot heden) (Dordrecht: Schefferdrukkerij, 1951), p. 37 (Tak B, generation XIa).

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