Hilda Van Stockum, who died yesterday at 98, was an author and illustrator of children’s books, including “The Winged Watchman” (1962), a dramatic tale based on real-life events in which the Dutch resistance used windmills to send coded messages during World War II.

Van Stockum’s native Netherlands was the setting for many of her books, including her first, “A Day on Skates,” which received a Newberry citation in 1935. Subtitled “The Story of a Dutch Picnic,” “A Day on Skates” featured an introduction by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Van Stockum’s aunt by marriage.

Van Stockum was raised partly in Ireland, and also in Ymuiden, the seaport of Amsterdam, where her father was port commander. With no car and few companions, she recalled turning to writing out of boredom. A penchant for art evidently ran in the family, which counted the van Goghs as distant relatives. Van Stockum attended art school in Amsterdam and later in Dublin, where she met and later married Ervin Ross “Spike” Marlin, who at the time was her brother Willem’s roommate at Trinity College.

Willem Van Stockum would go on to do pioneering work on the theory of relativity that became the scientific basis for theories of time travel; he was killed piloting a bomber over France in 1944. Van Stockum memorialized him in her book “The Mitchells” (1945), about the travails of raising a family in Washington, D.C., during the war. Asked who the book’s protagonist was, her son John Tepper Marlin said she answered, “The family is the protagonist. The family weathers the storms.”

Not surprisingly, Van Stockum was, in fact, raising a family in Washington, D.C., at the time, having married Marlin, by 1935 a Roosevelt administration official who had postings with the Social Security Administration and later with the Federal Security Agency, a forerunner of the Secret Service. During the war, Marlin joined the OSS and was posted to Ireland and London. He later helped set up the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal and became senior director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.

Van Stockum and the couple’s six children were in tow for Marlin’s peripatetic assignments, and it seems nothing short of miraculous that she managed to write and illustrate a score of children’s books. She also translated several other books from the Dutch and worked as a freelance children’s book illustrator.

Asked in 1942 by the Washington Post how she did it, Van Stockum replied with characteristic aplomb, “By neglecting my other duties.” Highly organized in her work, she illustrated and painted in the winter and wrote in the summer, when she could get her children out of the house.

Her books typically featured families and were set wherever she happened to be living; “Francie on the Run” (1939), about a child who escapes from a hospital, was set in Ireland. “Friendly Gables” (1960) updated the Mitchells’ saga — by then they had moved to Montreal from Washington.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Van Stockum began concentrating on more ambitious painting projects and had shows of her canvases at galleries in Geneva, the Netherlands, Washington, and Ottawa. The Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, which had made her an honorary member in 1984, presented a retrospective of her work in 1991. Her still life “Pears in a Copper Pot” was the subject of an Irish postage stamp in 1993.

Asked again to explain her extraordinary productivity, Van Stockum once wrote, “But whenever the phone isn’t ringing to tell me six children are coming to visit, or my daughter wants to go shopping with me, or will I please come because my youngest grandchild has swallowed a safetypin … and when I’m not cooking a dinner for unexpected guests or painting a picture, or looking at a funny play on television which I can’t miss because I like to hear my husband laugh, I’m writing.”

Hilda Van Stockum

Born February 9, 1908, in Rotterdam, Netherlands; died November 1 in Berkhamsted, England, of a stroke; survived by six children, 18 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. She became an American citizen in 1936. Her husband, Ervin Ross Marlin, died in 1995.