I'm a big proponent of writing your life story; I often think about the phrase that when we die, our words die with us. My husband and I recently took a trip to Minnesota near where my paternal grandparents had lived. I never met them, or my aunt or uncle. On our trip, we were …
Tag: Hoitenga
Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 3
Even though I didn’t feel Dutch on a 2001 trip to the Netherlands, finding my maiden name, Hoitenga, on tombstones in a Witmarsum cemetery brought me to tears and made my Dutch roots feel real for the first time. Fast forward to a few weeks ago in Aruba. My husband and I briefly met a …
Continue reading Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 3
Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 2
In Part 1 of this "identity" story, I wrote about finding a cemetery surrounding a church in Witmarsum, the town where my great grandparents lived in Friesland, The Netherlands. I'd taken along a photo of a distant relative taken outside the church in 1947. I posed for a picture in the same spot. Exciting! Note …
Continue reading Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery – Part 2
Finding My Identity in a Dutch Cemetery
I'm off to Aruba this week (see my header, the palm trees beckon), but come along with me on a story I wrote in 2001 about a trip we made to the Netherlands. I've been noticing on my WordPress stats page lately that I've had a steady flow of readers from there (welcome!), and I'm …
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