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Dutch couple celebrates their eightieth wedding anniversary


Tags: Excerpts from the Windmill

AMSTELVEEN – Retired bicycle dealer Pieter Ably and his French-born wife Henriette recently celebrated their “oak” wedding anniversary. News of the couple’s eightieth anniversary revealed that the Dutch central bureau for statistics (CBS) had not been tracing Dutch wedding anniversaries beyond the seventieth, also called the platinum celebration. CBS speculates that the Ably anniversary, the oak celebration, may be a first for the Netherlands. The Ablys, who moved to Amstelveen to be closer to family and now reside in a care facility, are both 102 years of age and profess to be still enamoured with each other. At least one other Dutch-born couple has reached their oak anniversary before the Ablys did. Jacob and Grietje Kuik (van der Sluis) celebrated their oak anniversary in Carman, Manitoba, Canada, on December 28, 1998. She died in 2001, after an 82-year marriage, at the age of 101. Her husband passed away in 2004, aged 104.