A new hobby

This 4th of May is Memorial Day in the Netherlands. We remember all the people who died in WWII and the ones who gave their lives to liberate our country from German occupation.

We went to visit 2 cemeteries here in the area today. Not because of the 4th of May, but my husband has a new hobby called "billiongraves". You install the app on your cellphone and then you go to a cemetery and take pictures of all the graves. It will remember the coordinates trough GPS and when you come home you can upload the pictures to the website and transcribe the names and dates. Some people only take pictures, some only transcribe.

The 2nd cemetery we visited was an old one with many German family graves. They moved to this area around the 1850's, mostly out of political unrest in their own country or to seek economic and social improvement.
Our school district still uses German family names for every school they build. The ISD is called "Klein", which means "little/small". School names are: Mueller, Metzler, Benignus, Hildebrandt, Frank, Ulrich, Strack, etc.

I also came across a gravestone for a husband and a wife. Behind theirs were 7 little gravestones. Engraved was only a text that said something like "infant son of ". Can you imagine losing 7 kids? Nowadays people need therapy for losing a child. How did those people cope? The wife was in her 90's when she died by the way, so somehow she managed to deal with it. But still...

This is a picture of one of the older gravestones. It's broken and it's been like this for some time. Some of the gravestones have been fixed or replaced by (probably) family.