German Invasion Dept: With few opportunities in Holland and longing for adventure, Diane immigrated to Canada at 29. In Chatham, Ont., she found a large community of Dutch immigrants – and she found her husband, Peter Noordermeer. Peter was handsome, handy and musically and artistically talented. After a nine-month courtship, they married in 1953, according to Globe And Mail. In her later years, Diane worked hard to keep her mind active. Stamp collecting became her obsession, particularly after Peter's death from colon cancer in 2005. It was difficult to find space on Diane’s dining-room table because it was usually covered in a mound of yet-to-be-sorted stamps. It was a disappointment to Diane, and a source of some guilt for her children and five grandchildren, that none of them shared her passion. Part of her legacy is more than 20 lovingly arranged stamp albums for each of her children and hard work and the pursuit of knowledge were Diane's core values. As the youngest of five children born on a small farm, she had to leave school after Grade 8 to earn money for the family. The 1940 German invasion of Holland, when she was 18, only strengthened her survival instincts. While her older brothers were often away assisting the Dutch underground, she stayed close to home to help the family eke out a living. The marriage brought five children – Jim, Wilf, Xavier, Dan and Judy. While Peter worked on an assembly line, Diane stayed at home, making the children's clothes, growing fruits and vegetables, baking and doing everything possible to stretch Peter's paycheque. She filled her children's lives with reading and learning, storybooks, encyclopedias, magazines and newspapers. School was paramount. That all the children would go on to postsecondary education was never in doubt. As
reported in the news.
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@t dutch immigrants, dutch underground
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