Day 4 - Family History Day

Today Erik's dad led us on a family tour of Haarlem and Zandvoort.

  

This is the house in Haarlem where Erik's grandma ("Oma") Margaretha was born and raised. It was here that her parents invited her friend Frans to stay when we was hiding from the Germans under Nazi occupation (he had escaped from doing forced labor for the Germans and was on their wanted "AWOL" list). Margaretha's parents took a medicine cabinet out of the wall and Frans (a 6'3" 18-year-old) crouched behind it during soldier raids. They married after the war was over.

This is the house where Frans and Margaretha moved after they married. Edward (Erik's dad) was born here and lived until he was four years old. Mormon missionaries knocked on the door one day and his parents converted to the LDS faith. They left Holland shortly thereafter and sailed to New York, then took a Greyhound bus to Salt Lake City and eventually settled in California. Aunt Rea told us Margaretha cried every day for months "I'll never see Holland again." After such a long journey it felt like she was at the ends of the earth, but they did save up money and visited Holland every few years while Ed was growing up.

 Backing up chronologically, this is the house in Zandvoort (a beach town) where Frans (Erik's grandpa, "Opa") lived with his 11 brothers and 2 sisters. Ed told us stories about their shenanigans like jumping off the roof with bedsheets trying to fly(breaking bones in the process). During the war, the Germans evacuated all the Dutch living in coastal towns because they feared they would assist Allied troops approaching by sea. So Opa's family was moved to Amsterdam, where the 11 brothers would put on boots and stomp through the streets so people would think they were Gestapo soldiers and leave them alone while they hunted for firewood for the family. Their father had recently died and they were desperately poor as their single mother tried to support all of those children during very hard times.

This is the house where Frans was born. We wish he could have come with us so we could have taken a picture of the four generations of Allebest men together at his birth place. He lives in Mission Viejo, CA - we just saw him last week.

We visited Ed's Aunt and Uncle still living in Zandvoort, and Stone quickly tired of sitting still in the formal living room while all the adults spoke Dutch. Luckily there was a cousin there with a long board! I am always amazed at children's ability to communicate without knowing each other's language. This boy was so sweet to Stone!

After a long but very special day visiting buildings and relatives, the kids were excited to get out and run along the beach. That's the North Sea and it was really cold! Grammy told us the Aunts used to say "If you swim out and hear people speaking English, you'll know you've swum too far." England is a short boat ride away.