‘GMA’s Ginger Zee Reflects on Family History With 1950s Throwback Pic

Ginger Zee recently took a trip down memory lane after stumbling across an old family photo.

The Good Morning America meteorologist opened up about her family’s U.S. history in a Monday, November 10, Instagram post, which featured a black-and-white photo from her dad’s childhood. “My aunt sent our family this photo of my dad and my Opa (grandpa) leaving the Netherlands to immigrate to the United States In the late 1950s,” she captioned the snap of her father and grandfather.

Zee noted that her aunt sent the photo “as my father was returning to Rotterdam for the first time since he came over via ship at age seven or so.”

Fans loved learning about Zee’s family background. “A treasure! Thank you, Ginger❤️👏🙌,” one user commented underneath the post, while another added, “Wow, 🙌love stories like this.”

“As our family historian (and I just solved a big mystery), I so cherish this photo! ❤️,” another person wrote. Someone else shared, “Wow, I can see you, in your father’s eyes…🙌🙌.”

 

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Other users shared similar stories from their own family histories. “My Opa came over from the Netherlands and then my Oma came over a bit later with 5 kids under 9,” a different user detailed. “We have a journal that my Opa wrote documenting his journey in Dutch and it was translated by a foreign exchange student when I was in high school.”

One commenter shared, “My parents emigrated here from Nederland. They came by ship with my 2 brothers in 1959, arriving on Christmas Day.”

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Zee has opened up about her Dutch heritage over the years, sharing in a 2018 essay for Guideposts Magazine that her father’s mother, Hilda Zuidgeest, served as a source of “stability” for her growing up with divorced parents.

“She and my grandfather had emigrated from Holland in the 1950s, after enduring the brutal Nazi occupation during WWII,” she shared at the time. “What she suffered was horrendous, much of which she never talked about, yet she and my grandfather had come through the experience somehow stronger.”

Zee continued, “She had a thick accent and a great sense of humor. ‘If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much,’ she’d say with a smile. We went to her house for Sunday dinner. She would say grace, thanking God for the good food and our family. She usually put in a joke that made us chuckle, then we would eat.”

In 2019, Zee served as the Grand Marshal of the Tulip Time Festival parade in Holland, Michigan. “My Oma (grandmother in Dutch) would be so proud 🤗 she would have been 100 this past weekend and came to the US at 40 years old from Rotterdam. She loved Tulip Time Festival — I am so proud to be the Grand Marshal of the parade later today,” Zee captioned Facebook photos of herself at the event, adding that it “meant everything” to share the experience with her eldest son, Adrian.

“When my Oma and Opa decided to move to America after the war they bucked tradition — back to the 1400s all boys in the Zuidgeest name were either Cornelius or Adrian,” she shared. “We brought Adrian back with my son 🙂.”

Zee and her husband, Ben Aaron, welcomed Adrian in December 2015, and expanded their family with the birth of their son Miles in February 2018.

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