Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 324

By Sheetar 2 April 2016 13 April 2016

This was just too good of a match to pass up for Sepia Saturday! The prompt image is from the Cornish Fishing Village of Clovelly, and I’ve long assumed that my image above is from a town in Cornwall as well though I don’t know the exact town. My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Battin, brought this over from England and put it in a big red velvet photo album along with other treasured cabinet card photos. The photos in the album range from the 1880s to 1910 or thereabouts, and only a few are labelled on the back. This photo, unfortunately, falls in the unlabeled set, but it’s a favorite of mine. I’d probably put the date right around 1900 based on the women’s dresses. Jessie left England around 1890, so this may have been taken after she left and sent to her in the USA to remind her of home. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough identifying landmarks to tell exactly where it was taken though and that may remain a mystery forever since I’m sure the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years. There isn’t even a photographer’s mark on the back – it’s just a photo mounted to an unremarkable plain piece of cardboard. If I were a betting woman, I’d wager this was sent from her hometown of Lawhitton, but it could be from any one of her friends or family that lived elsewhere.

There’s a lot to love about the photo – the dog sitting near the doorway on the left. The two girls standing just about in the center of the photo. The horse-drawn cart going down the street. The curious bystanders peering around each other to watch the photographer. The disembodied hand sticking out of the doorway on the left. The mystery of this photo may never be solved, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying this photo without knowing all the details!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 323

By Sheetar 26 March 2016 23 March 2016

For this week’s Sepia Saturday, our prompt image features a group of boys playing marbles. Well, no photos of marble playing in my collection, but I do have this really interesting photograph from my husband’s family. The back is a photo postcard back, and someone pencilled in, “D Jaarsma Tech High School,” in pen later on. That “D Jaarsma” would be my husband’s grandfather, Doede “Douglas” Jaarsma who apparently went to a technical high school as a kid. Best we can guess is that he’s the boy in the back row on the right side with a hammer slung over his shoulder.

It doesn’t quite look like a high school by our standards – the boys seem to range from maybe age 8 to 12 or so. Doede was born in 1911, so the photo date is probably about 1920 if we guess he’s just about 10, and the location is likely in Friesland, Netherlands. So, what school is this? I can’t say exactly, but we do have a report book from about 8 years later that indicates he attended a technical school (Vakteekenschool) in St. Nicolaasga. It’s possible this is his first year at that school which is why the photo was saved. I’ve put in scans of the report card below, and even found the school listed numerous times in the Delpher Newspaper Archive (link) advertising for teachers. There are a few other documents to support his work history that he brought with him from the Netherlands to the USA including certification of apprenticeship, a letter from a metalworkers’ union, and a trade certificate. I know that in later life, he shoed horses and did blacksmith type work in northern New Jersey, USA, so this all fits together very neatly with who he was after he came to the USA. It’s so great to have all these pieces of the puzzle to make a bigger picture of his employment and work history really come to life. The boys in my photo may not be playing with marbles, but they were learning skills and a trade.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 322

By Sheetar 19 March 2016 19 March 2016

This week for Sepia Saturday, our prompt photo showed two children feeding a lamb, taken from the Dutch National Archives. Well, what a better week to show a photo of Dutch children feeding a goat! I’ve put up the back of the photo too, even though I can’t make out the handwriting enough to translate it with Google Translate. There was no label on the page or on the photo to indicate who the children are, and there are even a few photos of them! They don’t look familiar, so I’m going to guess they may have been friends who lived near Uithuizen in the Netherlands where my husband’s grandmother grew up. The little girl on the far left does appear to be feeding the rather eager goat being held by the boy on the right who is wearing a pair of coveralls. There’s also a younger child standing just behind that boy on the right making for four children and a woman who may possibly be their mother. For a date, I’d be guessing possibly late 1930s or early 1940s based on the older woman’s clothes and the date range of the other photos in the same album. I haven’t solved any mysteries this week, but I did get a chance to share a nearly perfect match to our prompt photo this week, so that’s okay with me!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 321

By Sheetar 12 March 2016 14 March 2016

This week’s Sepia Saturday featured a photo of two people kissing in front of a crowd of people. Wouldn’t you know it, I don’t have a single sepia photo of people kissing! So, I went with the crowd and decided to explore a pretty well documented event in my husband’s family. On June 2, 1954, Pietertje de Boer (my husband’s great-grandmother), boarded the Maasdam at Rotterdam, Netherlands and departed for the USA. She arrived June 11th, 1954 and was greeted by her family seen in the photo above, and there’s a ship’s manifest to verify her visit. Pietertje is the woman second from the left, and the person taking the photo was likely Hilje (Dijkema) Jaarsma, her daughter-in-law, in Hoboken, New Jersey which was part of the Port of New York. There was a Holland America Line pier at Hoboken, so that’s likely the place she arrived.

From more passenger manifests, we know she departed on April 7, 1955 on the Ryndam after having spent almost a year with family in the USA and thankfully there are photos of that too. In the photo on the left, Pietertje is the woman standing on the far left. The photo on the right is of the Ryndam, ready to pick up passengers and depart the New York harbor.

Now back to that theme! On the left is a photo of the crowd of passengers waving goodbye to their loved ones from the ship, the Ryndam. On the right is a closer view of the ship showing Pietertje at the railing – she’s in the 3rd full window from the right. It’s really amazing to have these as a set to show her arriving and leaving. She had three children who left home in the Netherlands to go to the USA, so she probably made time to visit all three during her stay. Pietertje died just a few years after returning home on 13 February 1957. Her husband, Douwe Jaarsma, had passed away on 21 November 1940, so she presumably made the journey by herself as a 70-year-old woman.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 320

By Sheetar 5 March 2016 14 March 2016

Our Sepia Saturday theme this week featured men hauling jugs in front of a fountain in Mexico. Really none of those things fit the folks in my family tree and certainly not my husband’s tree, or at least not in those broad strokes. However, going with the fountain at the center of the photo, I found a pond!

In the left photo we have Albert Dijkema and his wife, Jantje Oosting along with their grandson, Johan. This was likely taken in the early 1960s in Holland, and I think it was taken at a small pond in the Noorderplantsoen (Northern Public Garden) – link to a current photo here. It even looks like at one time it did have a fountain which ties us in neatly to the prompt! I know that in 1949 via a record for a stillborn child, Albert was the Head Constable in Groningen (hoofdagent van politie). Albert and Jantje were married in Groningen on 10 October 1934.

In the right photo, it looks like at the same time/place is another photo with Johan’s mother Betsy, the daughter of Albert and Jantje. You can even see the same child in the background on the left side of the frame splashing in the water. I really love finding sets of photos like this since they tell a larger story together than they would apart. Albert and Jantje, proud of their grandson, took photos with him at a park in their town along with their daughter and then sent them to Albert’s sister an ocean away in the USA. While Albert passed away in 1993 and Jantje in 1974, Betsy and Johan may still be alive, with Johan being my husband’s second cousin.

It’s pretty exciting to be able to be able to piece this together and finally find the location. There are SO many photos in the collection from his side that sometimes it feels overwhelming. Fortunately, with Sepia Saturday, I get to take it one photo a week and in a way, it really does give me the opportunity to scrutinize photos I may not have otherwise given a second look!

UPDATE – 7 March 2016 – Exciting news! We have the place and an approximate date of 1961 (or 1962) confirmed by a living family member and sister of Johan. Finding this photo led me to look around Facebook for Johan and his siblings and sure enough, I found one! She got in contact right away and I’ve sent off a file full of photos for them. Really the best part of this is being able to reconnect all those photos with living descendants and connect to long lost family. So, Sepia Saturday leads me to a breakthrough yet again!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 319

By Sheetar 27 February 2016 26 February 2016

Our Sepia Saturday prompt image this week featured a photo of a group of Mennonite women ironing, dated 1951. Here I have a single woman and while it doesn’t look like she’s ironing, she’s doing something in the kitchen area, and there’s laundry hanging on a line, so it works for me! Plus, it’s probably dated about to the same year. The back is unlabeled, so I don’t know who the woman in the photo is. It’s likely that Leon Kitko, my grandfather, took the photo, but by 1951, his mother’s hair was already mostly grey based on other photos, so I don’t think this was her. There are two boys’ shirts hanging on the line in the photo, so if it was taken later (1957 or so?), it means those may be the shirts for my father and uncle, but that’s definitely not the interior of the place they were living (I don’t recognize the wallpaper) and the woman doesn’t appear to be a match for my grandma. So, I’m stumped! Either way, it’s a neat photo, taken candidly, of daily life. The woman has a rather fancy sheer apron on, but there are some pretty dirty socks hanging on the rack by the wash tub. There’s something about the fact that this was photographed probably by my sneaky grandfather being silly against the fact that there’s a really neat scene captured here that I just love, and I’m glad I could share it with you this week even if we haven’t quite figured out the identity of the mystery woman.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 318

By Sheetar 20 February 2016 18 February 2016

A boy and his dog for Sepia Saturday this week. It was SUPER easy to match to the prompt photo this week since we have dozens and dozens (possibly hundreds) of photos of family pets from the Kitko side of the family. Pictured here is my grandpa Leon Kitko and Tippy the dog. The photo is dated 1946, so this means Leon was 13. Location is in the yard of the family home in Beccaria, Pennsylvania – on the far left is the church we see in a number of other photos. I’m not quite sure why the back of the photo is labelled twice – perhaps the pencil was starting to fade and was re-done in ink later. On the label, Leon is called, “Buddy,” which was his childhood nickname. In fact, it was such a commonly used nickname that, as the story goes, when he went to his first day of school, the teacher called his full name during roll call and he didn’t respond. Being a small town, the teacher knew who he was already, so she asked him why he wasn’t responding. He replied, “My name is Buddy, not Leon.”

Over the years the family had a number of pets, but there are quite a few photos of Tippy through the years which is nice to see. Our pets have such short lives in comparison to ours, and it’s nice to see that they held a prominent enough spot in the lives of my ancestors to make it into saved photos.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 317

By Sheetar 13 February 2016 12 February 2016

This Sepia Saturday featured a group of men standing with golf clubs. None of my family were golfers (poor coal miners seldom have the time or money for golf), so I was a little stumped. In a flurry of scanning over the past few weeks, I came to this photo of three men all neatly lined up on their bikes and I thought, “AH! There’s my image for the prompt this week!” It may not be a sport per se, since in Holland it’s more a method of transportation than a sporting activity, but I thought it would fit well here. On the left is Doede Jaarsma (1911-1995) somewhere in the north of the Netherlands. The back of the photo is labelled, “Douglas and Friends,” and was probably written on after he took on the Americanized name of Douglas once arriving in the USA. The photo looks more like it was taken about 1930 when he was a younger man, so I have to assume it was either in/around Tjerkgaast in Friesland or in/around Uithuizen in Groningen. Two of the three men have one hand in a coat pocket, and the trees have no leaves, so I have to imagine it was a mighty chilly day to be on a bike. It’s really a brilliant photo and they’re captured while riding and not while standing still which is pretty neat (and tough to do with those old cameras).