Praising God

It's always a joy for us to worship at Phoenix Christian Reformed Church, but today turned out to be an especially joyful day as our grand-daughter Ellie sang for the first time with the praise team. Of course I shot videos!

Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

Jesus Love Me

I Know Whom I Have Believed (probably my favorite song of all time)

Cornerstone

Faith is the Victory

My Life is in You

The morning service also a sermon based upon Joshua 3 that was exactly the encouragement that our family needed to hear this morning. God knew just what message to deliver to us today. He is so good!

Last Day–De Trouwe Wachter

After Monnikendam, we headed for another repeat on this trip. Our friends, the family Verbiest, had been away on their own holiday and we weren’t sure we would get to see them. Fortunately, they arrived back just in time for us to visit them at the molen on our last afternoon. One of the best things about having been to the Netherlands several times is that we have made friends and not just visited the sites. De Trouwe Wachter is a non-pumping watermill where my great-grandmother was born. Her father was the first full-time miller to operate the mill in the mid 1800s. Jan Verbiest’s father had made the original arrangements to utilize the molen for a weekend retreat and now it has been passed down to Jan and his family.

Jan, Elles and their son Pold met us at the mill late in the afternoon. I got a real kick out of Pold, who does not understand English. He wanted to know why is parents were only speaking English with us and they had to explain that we only understand English. I’m sure he found this very strange. Pold was very anxious for us to see the animals that they care for on the neighbor’s property and the chicken coop that Jan had built so food was chopped up and off we went to feed the animals.

As we were ready to leave, Elles insisted that we get some photos of us at the molen.

This is a view that I never get tired of seeing!

Tienhoven

Not far from Utrecht is the little town of Tienhoven. It’s got a few more than ten houses today, but you can certainly see where it wasn’t much bigger than that when the name was first used. This is the location of De Trouwe Wachter – the polder molen where my great-grandmother was born.

Our day ended with a bicycle ride around the polder. It was a beautiful evening with perfect temperatures for riding.

Utrecht

The day started with thick fog all over the polder where the farm is located. Pretty magical stuff, but hard to capture in the camera.

The fog burned off quickly and caused no problems in getting to our first destination for the day: Utrecht.

It was market day in Utrecht.

The main focus in Utrecht is a visit to the places associated with my Mom’s father and mother. My grandfather worked in a bakery located at Oudegracht 319. These days it is an apartment building.

There is more info on this building in a post from our last visit in 2015: Huis Grijsesteijn

The church that you see in the background is the Geertekerk (St. Gertrude’s church). Originally build around 1255, then torn down and built within the city walls, it started as a Roman Catholic parish church. When the Protestant Reformation took hold in the Netherlands in 1578, Catholicism was outlawed and the building was given to the Reformed Church which used it until the 1930s. It then lay dormant and deteriorating until 1954 when it was purchased by the Remonstrant church and restored. This is the church where my grandfather and grandmother met, although they did not marry until they came to the U.S.

No visit to Utrecht would be complete without stopping in at Modelaine, the local knitting shop.

Lunch was a Hemaworst Broodje, enjoyed on the lamp-post bench in front of the store. Lekker!

Here are a few more shots from around Utrecht today. It was a beautiful day and everyone seemed to be out and enjoying it.

Terp Villages

Every trip we make to the Netherlands, we discover someone new in our family heritage - often with a new-to-us village that we need to explore. This year it was Welsryp, where Rose Dykstra Buss (Linda's Great-Grandmother) was born. Because this is Friesland, the village is officially known as Wjelsryp. In many towns the sign will show both Fries and Dutch versions on the sign.

Wjelsryp is a "terp village" - a raised area of earth above the marshes and peat bogs. Early residents of this area piled up earth to create dry areas that they could live on. Eventually the mounds were large enough to form a village - and a church was one of the first buildings built. After many centuries the mound has almost disappeared, but you can still see it at the church - it's still the highest point in the town.

It's a challenge to show in a photograph that the land is raised, but here are a couple more attempts.

Here are a couple of other shots from around the village

After Wjelsryp, we moved a little east to Kollum where my Great-great Grandfather Sake Hendriks Riemersma was born in 1823.

It is harder to see the terp in Kollum because of how the town has been built up, but there is some sign in the slope around the church.

Walking around the cemetery and reading the markers is like revisiting the church directory from our youth. There are so many deVries's that it's doubtful that the upper photo is a relative. The lower photo was taken so we could remember the Bible verse "OPENB. 14:13". There are a lot of Dutch words that you can puzzle out because they look a lot like English - not this one. It's an abbreviation for Revelation 14:13.

This church was built starting in the twelfth century with the tower, then expanded in the 1800's. One of the clues about how old it is comes from the window in the tower. It shows just how thick the wall is, and it has a small Romanesque window - quite different from the large Gothic style windows in the newer sections.

This is the only Bok grave in the cemetery. Not a relative that we know of, but Kollum isn't very far from Burum where my Great-great Grandmother Korneliske Hendriks Bok was born.

Burum has a windmolen that is quite unusual. It's a grain grinding mill, but the only mill I have ever seen that has aluminum sails in place of the traditional wooden sails. I had no idea this existed when I was musing at Zandhaas about a modern version of the traditional mill.

We had experienced cloudy skies all day, and it began to rain while we were exploring the churchyard, but on the way home we ran into such heavy rain that we pulled off the highway for some supper and to let the storm move past us. I'm not sure I really captured it, but it was fun to see the raindrops falling against the sun.