His father was a businessman and politician who sat on the Amsterdam city council and was a member of parliament in the province of North Holland before and during World War I.
[1] His grandfather was Charles Boissevain, who had been the editor and part-owner of the Amsterdam Algemeen Handelsblad, a leading newspaper of its day.
[3] As a young man in Holland, Boissevain had been a champion sculler and an ice skater (elfstedentocht 1917), but these activities were curtailed when he contracted tuberculosis.
At the advice of his doctors, he moved to the United States in 1923 and made his way to the Colorado mountains in search of relief.
[3] It covers species in the genera Opuntia, Echinocereus, Sclerocactus, Coloradoa, Pediocactus, Coryphantha, and Neobesseya and includes numerous black-and-white photographs.