By the late 1800s this church was beginning to fall a part, as you can see in this other picture. They rebuilt it and that church is still standing there today.
I went to go visit this village because in the mid 1700s, Allert Broers Broersma was a school master there. He was born and married in a nearby village of Wons. In 1732 he moved to Dedgum where he became school master, and later a village judge. He may have lived here the rest of his life, but I have not been able to find a death date for him.
So how big was Dedgum back then? Probably around 40 or 50 people. That's how many were registered in 1744. You can see all the families on one page. Mr. A Broersma is about 2/3rds down the page.
As you can see he has a wife and 2 children. In the far right column you can see the number of people in each household, and at the bottom is the total of all people: 46. That's how small the village was then, just 10 households. Over half of the population were kids, so most of them were probably attending his school.
Unfortunately, the school is no longer there. When we visited the village in 2013, we asked. Someone told us that there used to be a school house, but it had been torn down. Now it's someone's backyard. We took a picture anyway though.
We grabbed a couple pictures of the church. I liked the fence.
And I went ahead and stole this picture so you can get a birds eye view of how small the village is.
