No Walking Today, Just Gravestones

Yesterday I was feeling quite wonderful and spent some time exploring Leeuwarden on foot, walking about five miles in the process.  Yes, I know that isn't very far and many of you walk that far just to get to work every morning.  But this is after all an adventure for someone of advancing age and I've spent most of my life sitting in front of a computer.  And I felt those five miles in every muscle and every bone and every fiber this morning.

So it was a good day to move the computer onto the balcony and enjoy the sunshine and look for graveyards.  I've begun planning the road trip I'll take at the end of the month and I was hoping to identify the final resting places of the many ancestors I've identified over the years.  I already knew that the cemeteries in Twyzel contain the graves of many of our ancestors from the Sipkema, Hulshof, and Kloosterman families as we found when we visited several years ago. 

Jimmy is now 16 so you can see how long ago this was taken.

I ran into some difficulty when I went looking for the DeHaan family.  I found that the cemeteries in those villages rarely contained anyone who had died later than the mid-20th century.

You may know that in the Netherlands, land has literally been created from the sea and every inch is used for a purpose, habitation or crops or pasturage.  In order not to waste space on cemeteries, it is customary in many locations for Dutch graves to be rented, and reused after the rental period expires. Headstones and other monuments are destroyed, and human remains removed and often reburied in an anonymous mass grave.  When searching for the Evers ancestors some years ago, we were taken to the village church and given the opportunity to search the church floor, which had been created from the old headstones of the graveyard behind the church. 

I find this custom a little unsettling.  It's practical, I know, but still a little unsettling.