January 17 » El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico becomes part of the United States National Forest System as the Luquillo Forest Reserve.
April 19 » The Kishinev pogrom in Kishinev (Bessarabia) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Palestine and the Western world.
June 11 » A group of Serbian officers stormed the royal palace and assassinated King Alexander Obrenović and his wife, Queen Draga.
October 31 » The Purdue Wreck, a railroad train collision in Indianapolis, kills 17 people, including 14 players of the Purdue University football team.
December 14 » The Wright brothers make their first attempt to fly with the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
December 17 » The Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Day of death February 17, 1978
The temperature on February 17, 1978 was between -7.2 °C and -0.9 °C and averaged -4.5 °C. There was 7.5 hours of sunshine (75%). The partly clouded was. The average windspeed was 2 Bft (weak wind) and was prevailing from the northeast. Source: KNMI
In The Netherlands , there was from Monday, December 19, 1977 to Friday, September 11, 1981 the cabinet Van Agt I, with Mr. A.A.M. van Agt (CDA/KVP) as prime minister.
March 16 » Supertanker Amoco Cadiz splits in two after running aground on the Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in the largest oil spill in history at that time.
April 14 » Tbilisi Demonstrations: Thousands of Georgians demonstrate against Soviet attempts to change the constitutional status of the Georgian language.
April 28 » President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by pro-communist rebels.
August 17 » Double Eagle II becomes first balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean when it lands in Miserey, France near Paris, 137 hours after leaving Presque Isle, Maine.
December 11 » The Lufthansa heist is committed by a group led by Lucchese family associate Jimmy Burke. It was the largest cash robbery ever committed on American soil, at that time.
December 16 » Cleveland, Ohio becomes the first major American city to default on its financial obligations since the Great Depression.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Hans Weening, "Family tree Weening", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/stamboom-weening/I168966.php : accessed February 16, 2026), "Gerrit Dijkstra (1903-1978)".
Copy warning
Genealogical publications are copyright protected. Although data is often retrieved from public archives, the searching, interpreting, collecting, selecting and sorting of the data results in a unique product. Copyright protected work may not simply be copied or republished.
Please stick to the following rules
Request permission to copy data or at least inform the author, chances are that the author gives permission, often the contact also leads to more exchange of data.
Do not use this data until you have checked it, preferably at the source (the archives).
State from whom you have copied the data and ideally also his/her original source.