(2007 heemkundevereniging “De Hooge Dorpen” * isbn 9789077747179)
What was supposed to be a photobook with old pictures of the village where I was born, grew out to be a book of 330 pages with the history of Knegsel, mainly focussingon the 20th century, but also with some steps further back. A wide variety of subjects is written about, from agriculture to the Church, from school to the middle class, from folklore to societies of course with a lot of old and new photos. The book is well written by the quartet Mia Geerts-Van Dooren, Riek van Ham-Gijbels, Frans Klaasen and Mat Theunissen and presented a few weeks ago under huge attention in the local parish hall with inhabitants of the village, but also people from the region. However the “heemkundekring” has more publications and a website where to order them, somehow it seems that they want to keep this new book in a somewhat smaller spreading, but should you be one of the very few visitor of Gangleri and interested in a book about a tiny village in the Southeast of Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands, it won’t hurt to visit the website (click on the cover of the book) and fill in the “contact” form. The title (by the way) means “if it rains, we’ll take the tower inside”, a joke referring to the church of only 25 metres that could be easily put inside somewhere when it risks getting wet.
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