The photo we discovered in the album.
The portrait -- it's a pencil drawing
About a month ago I got really excited to discover that we actually have a bunch of photos of some of the German people we’ve been learning about. This has happened a few times: I’ll look at something in one of our boxes or trunks of treasure and it’s maybe cool but doesn’t mean a lot so I basically forget about it. A few months later, I’ll be digging around and pull out something that I’d seen earlier and dismissed only to realize it's now super meaningful because of something I’ve learned since.
That’s what happened with this old fancy photo album that we came across not long after my mom died. There was one really exciting find in that moment we first opened the album but the other photos didn't mean much.
I'll start with that exciting initial discovery. At some time long after I moved away from home my parents unearthed this amazing portrait of a woman in an elaborate wood frame. My parents hung it in the bedroom that my sister and I shared, in a little sitting area. My dad always told us it was Mary Wald, his grandmother. To give you an idea of scale, it's really big: the drawing itself is almost 20" by 15.5" but including the frame it's 26" by 30". James and I now have it hanging in our dining room.
So it was super exciting when flipping through this old album for the first time that I saw the photograph that the portrait had clearly been drawn from. I couldn’t believe it. Plus, there’s another photo of her with a man – Mary Wald is Franz’s wife, so now I suspect we also have a picture of Franz, the recipient of all the German letters!
Mary Wald and, presumably, Franz Gohring
The photo album
After that first discovery the album went back in a box for more than a year. A month or so ago I ended up digging through the remaining boxes in my sister's basement and we came across the album again. This time, I was able to recognize a ton of people whose names are written on backs or fronts. These are people I'd never heard of that first time we opened the album but I now feel like I know after reading the letters and digging through old records.
A caveat: I have no idea who wrote the names on the photos or if they’re for sure accurate. One that I find questionable is a photo of a man in uniform that is marked Henry on the back. Our Heinrich, the POW, is referred to often as Henry. But there's another picture of a man in uniform, this one with a red collar that I think looks very much like the Henry in other photos. Do you think the two photos of men in uniform are the same guy? They look different to me.
This one says Henry on the back
There are no markings on this one but I think it looks like the Heinrich in other photos.
This says it's Henry on the back. The woman looks just like the woman in the postcard that Rosa says is Heinrich's wife.
Back of the photo of Henry with his wife, Maria
Henry's wife and kids, while he's in Algeria.
The back of the photo of Heinrich's wife and kids.
The individual photos identify these folks as Lorenz (seated), Henry, Rosa and the mysterious Magdelene
Back of the picture of Lorenz
Lorenz
The four individual pictures from the family portrait
The postcard of the woman with kids was sent by Rosa and says that it's Heinrich's wife and kids and that she's sent the same photo to Heinrich in Algeria. The littlest one, then, would be Heinrich Josef who was born on Dec. 31, 1914, while Heinrich was in the POW camp. It appears that at some later date someone wrote "wife and family of Henry" on the postcard.
There are definitely some mysteries here. For instance, Lorenz's wife and the mother of Franz, Heinrich and Rosa, was named Stefania, according to all of the records we've found online. However, the small picture of the older woman in the family photo has Magdelena written on it. I'm fairly certain that Stephania definitely wasn't dead yet based on the letters (although I've established I could be wildly misunderstanding the translations.). I don't know who Magdelena would be but I do know that the following generation has both a Stephania and a Magdelene (my grandfather has sisters named Magedelene and Stephania Frances).
The biggest gap I have right now is our Rosa who wrote the majority of the German letters. We don’t even know if she married, for sure if she had kids or when she died. There is an unknown photo mixed in with the letters that James and I have been cruelly referring to as Scary Lady who I’m starting to wonder might be Rosa. There's a photo, a postcard of the photo and even some stamps made of the image. The woman in the photo is so severe, with that creepy sideways cross, and my mental image of Rosa is different so I've been resistant to thinking it's Rosa. Also, do you think she looks like the Rosa in the family photo above? Perhaps we’ll figure out at some point whether or not it’s Rosa. Email me or chime in on Facebook if you have an opinion.
Unknown Scary Lady
Back of the image
Letter with stamp of Scary Lady
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