Tag: Michigan

Dutch Heritage – From a Novel to an Archive

Dutch Heritage – From a Novel to an Archive

You never know where a story is going to take you. One that I read as a child led me to a digitization project in the Heritage Hall Archives at Calvin University. Now I am working on the collections associated with Albertus C. Van Raalte, 

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating – Part III

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating – Part III

The previous two blog posts started a story told by Dan Poortenga about his great grandfather Peter Oudshoorn. Dan first wrote this story as a paper in a Calvin College history course in the early 1990s. He interviewed his great grandfather and set his story 

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating – Part II

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating – Part II

Our previous blog post started the story of Peter Oudshoorn emigrating from the Netherlands to the United States in 1904, as told by his great grandson, Dan Poortenga. Dan first wrote about Oudshoorn in an assignment for a Calvin College history course in the early 

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating

A Great Grandfather’s Memories of Immigrating

This week’s blog post is based on a paper by Dan Poortenga, who graduated from Calvin College in 1992. In a history course on the Netherlands with Herb Brinks, then curator of Heritage Hall, Dan wrote an essay about his great grandfather, Peter Oudshoorn, who 

Garrett Heyns and the Calvin Prison Initiative

Garrett Heyns and the Calvin Prison Initiative

Garrett Heyns (1891-1969) died five decades before the Calvin Prison Initiative was born, but it is a part of his legacy. Heyns was a Christian educator whose vocation took an unexpected turn in 1937. Things started conventionally enough for the Calvin alum. He was born