Arie Barendrecht- Maternal Grandfather

In the process of updating this blog and organizing the entries by adding Pages (which took me a looooong time to learn!), I discovered that I had absolutely no entry for Ancient Family History!!! This is something soon to be corrected because my children need to know their heritage. Featured here is Arie Barendrecht- my mother's father. Actually, this first photo shows my mother, her mother (my grandmother and namesake Johanna Rottier) and her father (my grandfather) Arie Barendrecht. 

The photo above shows the three of them in NYC, and this was the first time my grandparents came to America to visit us. They stayed 4 months that time. In those days, everyone who visited across the pond stayed for months at a time. They arrived by boat, and my parents drove to New York to pick them up. It was amazing to them that it should take two days of driving to get home to use in Grandville, Michigan.

I was named after my grandmother Johanna Rottier, who was born in Zeeland, a province in The Netherlands. She was a great Oma-- lots of fun and loved to play games. 

My grandfather worked his way up to be a supervisor at Piet Smit, a ships-building company in the Netherlands. He valued education highly. As a young father he went back to school to earn his diploma so that we could advance his career. According to my Aunties, he was a great father to his daughters, and wanted them to be educated so that they could fend for themselves if they had to. 

Here he is signing the marriage book at city hall for one of his daughter-- in The Netherlands marriage, and weddings, are done a bit differently, with first going to city hall to complete the formalities. 

Here he is in uniform in World War 1. What a handsome young fellow!