maria background

Maria Hertogh was born on 24 March 1937 to a Dutch Catholic family living in Tjimahi, near Bandung, Java, then a part of the Dutch East Indies. Her father, Adrianus Petrus Hertogh, came to Java in the 1920s as a sergeant in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. He married Adeline Hunter, a Eurasian of Scottish-Javanese descent brought up in Java, in the early 1930s. Maria was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Ignatius at Tjimahi on April 10 by a Catholic priest.