Two of our community members were able to discover a sad posting regarding Enno.
Wim Berrelkamp is a fellow Groningen descendant who had met with Enno last November at Enno’s home in Driebergen following intensive genealogical eMail correspondence. Wim was unable to make contact in January and grew concerned. A message left with Enno’s local autism group was returned with sad tidings, their call informed Wim that Enno had suffered a heart failure, passed at the age of 64 in hospital 27 January 2025, and the service had been on the 3rd of February. He had been active in several online forums only 2 days before his sudden passing.
Enno Frank Borgsteede, born 26 Jul 1960 to Frans Borgsteede 1934-2004 and Rina Borgsteede-Nooij 1932- 2024, was laid to rest Monday, 3 Feb at the Zeister Bosrust cemetery in Zeist, Netherlands.
“Plots was het stil, voorgoed nu…” [Suddenly it was quiet, forever now…]
image courtesy of the Facebook page of his sister, Irma
Enno has been a constant and helpful presence in our community since he originally posted to the Gramps Developer Mailing List, offering a hack (to import AFN and REFN data via CSV import into Gramps 3.3) in July of 2011. His posting of a public Tree to WeRelate in 2009 explained that he had taken up genealogy to preserve the research legacy of his father.
Enno helped uncounted genealogists through problems with technology. He applied the experience gained in his 20 year career (as an Information Analyst for a government public safety department) to help migrate their data and clean their databases. In recent years, he was always the first to volunteer to help with GEDCOM dialect problems. He had collected a variety of external tools to convert custom format data into several genealogical software databases.
Enno was also an outspoken critic when he felt discussions or development was going sideways. You were never in doubt of where he stood in conversations. Some were offended and others found his frankness refreshing. He and I spent many hours in side conversation.
He is - and will continue to be - sorely missed.
If Enno helped you, please consider helping ensure what he cared about is not lost. He has a public repository on GitHub that forks tools he supported and some of his own code. 15 of the 51 issues that he felt strongly enough to file remain outstanding. These orphaned issues need people to adopt them and ensure that they stay in play.