Eddie Van Halen was born in 1955 in the Netherlands to a Dutch father and an Indonesia-born mother.
The story of his family’s move to the United States in 1962 and Eddie’s (and his brother Alex’s) subsequent rise to stardom is well known by fans and admirers all over the world. Lesser known is the ancestry Eddie has from his mother Eugenie van Beers.
Eugenie was born in a little village called Rangkasbitung in the far western part of Java in Indonesia. This was the administrative centre of the district Lebak in the residency Bantam.
Eugenie van Beers’ mother, also named Eugenie, bore the surname Mafficioli del Castelletto. Her father, Frans van Beers, was of Italian descent, and her mother was an Indonesian woman called Roebinem. Frans van Beers’s father’s name is unknown to us, and his mother was an unknown Indonesian woman, reports Asal Oesoel.
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Eugenie van Beers’ grandfather on her mother’s side had an unknown Indonesian mother as well. Therefore it can be said that mother Eugenie was of mixed European and Asiatic descent, with at least five out of eight Indonesian great-grandparents.
Eddie’s father, Jan van Halen, immigrated to the Dutch East Indies (which is now Indonesia) after World War II where he met Eugenie van Beers.
Jan and Eugenie married in 1950 and re-immigrated to Holland 1953, where they settled in Amsterdam.
Shortly after Eddie’s birth the family moved to Nijmegen in the Dutch province of Gelderland.
In 1962, the Van Halens crossed the Atlantic and moved to California. It was there that Eddie and his brother, the two Dutch born Indo-Americans, started to write music history and the Van Halen story began.
