In the seventeenth season of The hidden past It’s Cornelis Willem Heckeroth’s turn, known as Gordon, to dig into his past. The episode initially stayed close, in Amsterdam Noord, where Gordon (55) currently lives in a spacious apartment and also grew up in Floradorp.

The singer and presenter was particularly curious to know if there were more musical relatives in his family tree. His father played the pickup guitar and his mother played the harmonica. In addition, there was a story in the family that great-grandfather was a conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, but there was no proof.

At first he stayed near his home, in Floradorp, where an archivist from the municipality was able to tell more about his ancestors. Gordon first heard that they had lost two children at an early age, just as they were living in the Jordan River. He knew that his grandfather had died in an accident at work: he had been hit by a wheelbarrow full of cement. Gordon did not know that his grandfather had divorced after his grandmother committed adultery. “It’s actually a big soap opera, my family. Who’s going to put a wheelbarrow on their head?

No, so there was more music in the Singelkerk archivist’s findings. Not only was one of Gordon’s ancestors, Richard Heckroth, a conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, but his distant ancestor Martin Heckroth also formed a small orchestra with his eight sons. “I’m falling out of my chair,” said a bewildered Gordon.

An ardent archivist even discovered an 1869 review of a concert of the “Heuckeroth Octet”—and that review was more positive than Gordon himself ever received.

“Stop me!” Gordon said. “It touches me because I have great musical ancestors. People were still writing positively about music at that time.

Gordon was then allowed to go to Germany, where one of his ancestors was a gatekeeper, with a trumpet, and he also had distant relatives living in Tyrol. “You can’t be serious, we used to go on holiday there with our parents.”

Gordon, who spoke a fair amount of German, thought the trip was an “incredibly wonderful experience”. “For the first time I can be proud of my title, even though in the past I was bullied for it. I have regained my self-confidence,” said Gordon, sitting in a Tyrolean Alps meadow.

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