Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The HOEKSTRA Girls

Featured in the February 23rd Edition of Terry Thornton's "Harvest from the Blog Garden" at Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi.

I learned about George Geder's Genealogy~Photography~Restoration blog through Craig Manson of GeneaBlogie, I think. George has been doing Wordless Wednesday posts for a while, both of his ancestral photos and of his fantastic own pix (he's a photographer by trade). Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I thought I'd emulate his actions here.




These two little cuties are my maternal grandmother, Ruth Lillian HOEKSTRA, and her younger sister, Hope Mildred HOEKSTRA, taken as the captions indicate, in Tacoma, Pierce County, Washington in 1921, when Grandma was 35 months old, and Hope was 13 months. This would have been in December of that year, as Grandma was born on 16 January 1919.

Ruth and Hope were the oldest of three girls born to my great-grandparents, John Martin HOEKSTRA and Lillian Fern STRONG. Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, John, Lillian and Ruth came out West for a few years because John's parents, Martin HOEKSTRA and Jennie TON, and his brother and sister-in-law, Peter Louis Ton HOEKSTRA and Reatha Pearl DONOVAN, had also relocated there for better job opportunities. Lillian's parents, Charles Frisbe STRONG and Mary Lucy WRIGHT, were living several hundred miles south near Hubbard, Marion County, Oregon, with her brother Frank Charles STRONG. While the family was out west, Hope was born in Tacoma. The Hoekstra family returned to Michigan and remained there for the rest of their days. Mary Louise HOEKSTRA, John and Lillian's youngest daughter, was born in 1923 in Grand Rapids.

Ironically, after Hope grew up and married, she moved to Tacoma with her husband, had four children, and died and was buried there in 1968...the same city in which she was born.

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