Marja Smit - van de Vathorst spent more than fifteen years researching the history of her mother's family, the Frijdas, in Holland.  She decided to  write down her findings in English because many of her mother's grandchildren, and other Frijda descendants as well, are no longer living in that country, while most Dutch people can read English.

The — Jewish — Frijda family consists of two related lines — one based in Veenendaal and the other in Sneek — that diverged during the early 19th century.  This book is mainly concerned with the Sneek line, but the pre-19th century history of the Frijdas is also fully explored.  The Sneek line survives in four branches, descended from four brothers born between 1830 and 1850 and the author includes information about their mother's as well as their father's ancestry. 

Chapter One consists of four sections concerned with the Italiaander, van Emden, Tall, and Broekhuijsen families, in that order.  Chapter Two gives the early history of the Frijda family in Holland, enumerating all known Frijdas from the first occurrence of the name in the 1720s until the marriage of Joseph Frijda and Mariane Broekhuijsen in Sneek one hundred years later.

Chapter Three follows the next three generations, many of whose members died in the Holocaust. Chapter Four then tells the personal stories of five survivors, two from the largest branch and one each from the other three.

The book has more than 400 pages, over 230 illustrations, and many part-family trees as well as a large "map" showing the ancestors of the four brothers — in some lines as many as seven generations — on one side, and on the other four generations of their descendants.