Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 300

By Sheetar 27 October 2015 28 October 2015

I’m catching up on Sepia Saturday after having been on vacation, so bear with me! No theme this week which means it’s time to celebrate with something completely different! Usually the prompts for Sepia Saturday are informal, candid style photos, so I’m going with a more posed, formal photo with a very exact date this time. The handwriting is pretty clear, but the back of the photo reads

Eula F. Patrick’s Birthday Party
July 10th 1891
8 years old

Eula F Patrick was born Eula Frances Patrick on 10 July 1883. I haven’t been able to find out much about her mother – the only record I could find in my haste was a census from 1910 that says her mother was born in Massachusetts. Her father was John C Patrick (6 Jul 1848 – 25 Dec 1918) who was a travelling photographer with a base in Coalport, Pennsylvania, but he lived primarily in South Carolina. My family definitely utilized his photographic services over the years, and he apparently shared a photo of Eula’s 10th birthday with my great-great grandmother. John was also from England which may be why my great-great grandparents, also from England, patronized his services over other local photographers. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find out much else about the Patrick Family. Eula married Julius Sinclair Burch, and John’s death certificate lists his mother’s surname as Hardesty.

In the photo above, I have no idea which child is Eula! The majority seem to be girls with one boy sitting in the front. In the back, there’s a child with a shaved head, but it’ shard to tell if the child is a boy or a girl based on clothing alone. I don’t think any of my great grandmother’s siblings are in the photo. My great great grandmother Jessie Battin married Alfred Powis on 19 Feb 1891, so it’s possible they became fast friends after having gotten to know eachother when John Patrick took their wedding photo. Now that I look at the two photos together, the background is the exact same background between the wedding photo and the birthday photo, so it’s possible Jessie and Alfred attended the party as adult guests! I can’t find any hard evidence to support that, but it would make sense given that they have a photo of the children at the party.

And with that wrapping up a birthday photo, I wish a very happy 300th birthday of sorts to Sepia Saturday! 300 prompts old and still going.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 299: Cut-Outs, Medicine, Babies, Feeding

By Sheetar 3 October 2015 1 October 2015

On time this week for Sepia Saturday! Here we have two babies and the one on the left is chewing on a rattle. The back is labelled, “Betsy en Jacob,” or Betsy and Jacob, two children of Willemina Dijkema and Derk Rop. Willemina was a sister of my husband’s paternal grandmother and stayed in Holland with her children and husband. I’m not quite sure who is who of the two adult women, nor who is who among the children, but I know at least that the children are Betsy and Jacob. Based on their birth/death dates, this was likely taken in the early 1940s in Holland, probably somewhere around Groningen. Short and sweet this week, looking forward to the big 300!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 298: Girls, Twos, Dogs, Steps

By Sheetar 1 October 2015 1 October 2015

Better late than never for Sepia Saturday this past week! I’ll admit that I wasn’t entirely sure what photo I was going to use this week, but I settled on another unknown photo in the collection from my maternal grandmother. Probably taken around 1950 in Clearfield or Cambria county in Pennsylvania, these photos show some young boys with puppies and a dog. I have absolutely no clue who they were – there are no labels and no living relatives recognized them. If we go a little broader with the theme, these fit in nicely as children with dogs. The young boy above is sitting with three little puppies.

These young men are sitting with the puppies and the dog who I assume is the mother of the puppies. It makes me think that perhaps someone’s dog had a litter and all the young boys in the neighborhood picked out a puppy to bring home. It’s possible that they may even be brothers since they seem to look similar with curly light hair and similar facial features. They’re really adorable photos even if I don’t know who the boys were!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 297: Washing Line, Pegs, Laundry

By Sheetar 19 September 2015 16 September 2015

Another week closer to the big 300 for Sepia Saturday. This week featured a photo of a woman hanging laundry, and luckily the above photo came across in my batch of scanning this week! A rather fortunate coincidence and a perfect fit for the theme. Even if there’s no one hanging laundry in the photo, it’s clear a bunch of houses ran on the same schedule for wash day. It’s not a sight you see often anymore, but I happen to be a big fan of the solar drying method. In fact, once when I had hung out a batch of clothes on a crisp spring day, the neighbor came over to ask if my dryer was broken and offered me use of hers. She was a little stunned to find out that I had hung out laundry to dry on purpose! My mother almost never used the dryer we had at home – clothes were either hung outside on the line on nice days or inside on racks when the weather didn’t cooperate. It’s free, using no electricity, and the clothes don’t get beat up and ruined as fast as they do in the dryer.

This photo was likely taken in the mid 1950s in New Jersey likely at the home of Hiljea and Doede Jaarsma. There’s no date or information on the back of the photo other than, “Wash day.” A rather short but sweet post again, but one that brings back memories of fresh, crisp, line-dried sheets.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 296: Adverts, Wine, Labels

By Sheetar 12 September 2015 12 September 2015

It’s still Saturday where I am, so I’m still squeaking into Sepia Saturday this week. I didn’t have any labels for the theme, but it reminded me of this lively set of photos we came across from my grand-aunt Nellie Gasparri. Nellie Gasparri was born 9 May 1924 in Dysart, PA and died 9 Oct 2007 in Pittsburgh, PA. She was the first daughter of Silvio Gasparri and Tosca “Mary” Innocenti, both Italian immigrants from around Pistoia, Italy. In the photos above, Nellie is in the crop top – in the bottom right photo, she’s the gal on the left. I’m not sure who the other folks are and no living relatives were able to identify them. In all the photos, they’re celebrating or toasting something, raising a glass, pouring a glass, or smiling and having a good, silly time. Nellie married once, briefly, and divorced after only a year. She spent the rest of her life single and never married again. There are no labels on the backs of these photos at all, so to guess a date, I’d say somewhere in the early 1950s or so – Nellie looks to be about in her 20s. There are a few more photos in this series, but they’re all about the same with different configurations of people and even one where the unidentified younger woman is drinking out of the bottle! Perhaps someday, I’ll be able to find out who they were and toast a glass in their honor.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 295: Bridges, Fog, Buses

By Sheetar 5 September 2015 3 September 2015

Another Sepia Saturday, and we’re inching closer and closer to the big 300! In case it’s not clear, the two men in the picture above are sitting on a bridge which fits me into the theme this week. On the left is Harry Oscar Frederick “Fritz” Powis (1903-1972). On the right is Alfred Herbert “Herb” Powis (1892-1926). This is one in a series of three photos taken at the same place with different configurations of people, obviously marking the occasion of Herb returning from the Army after World War I. From a date on one of the other photos, these were taken March 1, 1919. Herb married Junua Goldie Patchin on 25 April 1918 in a quiet, small ceremony just before leaving for war. The local newspaper reported, “The young couple slipped quietly away and it came as a gerat surprise to their many friends and relatives.” From Herb’s obituary, we learn, “He entered the Army in June of 1918 and he was a Private in Headquarters Co., 162nd Infantry. He was active service in France for nine months and was honorably discharged from the Army May 1919.” I haven’t been able to find out much about his time in the Army, but the obituary points to an illness that he brought back during his time abroad. His death certificate indicates he died of Pulmonary Tuberculosis at age 33. I can’t imagine his family thought much of the Army after his service abroad is what killed him slowly and painfully. Below are the other two photos in the set. And now? Now we cross the bridge and look forward to the next Sepia Saturday!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 294: Travel, Overcrowding, Blankets

By Sheetar 29 August 2015 27 August 2015

I showed up for the voyage on time this week for Sepia Saturday! Yet again this week, when I saw the preview image a few weeks in advance, I had no idea what photo to use. Thankfully that new acquisition of family photos from my husband’s family yielded this amazing find which fits in fairly well. This appears to be a photo of Hilje (Dijkema) Jaarsma and a class of some sort. The back is labelled, “Knapen en Meisjes ver:, 27,” which translates to, “Boys and girls far: 27.” The 27 doesn’t seem to mean 1927, unless of course it’s a 21 and then it’s 1921 which fits better since Hilje was born in 1914 and would have been 7 in 1921 and better matches the ages of the children in the photo. The little “X” on the photo marks where Hilje was sitting and is directly over her head. Also included in the box was her report card book (Rapportenboekje) which shows that in 1922, she attended some sort of Christian School (probably around Groningen, though the exact school isn’t listed on the card). It starts with the first grades on 24 January 1922 and goes through 24 December 1926. Family history says that she only attended about 5 years of school so that lines up rather nicely! I know that Hilje’s father, Hendrik Dijkema, was a turfschipper (so hard to translate to English – it’s something like “peat boatman” which is a person who sold peat fuel logs from a barge type boat). I wonder if perhaps this was the school bus for children of other families in the shipping industry. Northern Holland, around Groningen, is full of canals, and it’s entirely possible that this was her first-day-of-school photo as they were going off to the school house on their “school bus.” The ages of the children vary – from some that look to be in their early teens to younger children who look to be about 5 or 6. The only solid piece of data I have is that Radio Foto in Paterswolde took the photo! It’s another treasure though for sure, and I’m glad to have it travel through the internet for you to view!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 293: Cafe, Shopping, Canteen

By Sheetar 27 August 2015 27 August 2015

Just when I thought I’d have absolutely nothing for this week’s Sepia Saturday theme, I ended up with two photos to fit perfectly. My husband’s parents recently moved and cleaned out the home they’d lived in for almost 40 years. During the course of cleaning, they found boxes of old photos that were saved when my husband’s grandparents died. I remember his father telling us that my husband’s grandmother had been sent away when she had tuberculosis which also ended her engagement to an unknown man. At the end of her treatment, she met and married my husband’s grandfather and the rest is history! Hilje Dijkema and Doede Jaarsma were married in 1941, and if I remember correctly, family history tells me that she was in the hospital somewhere around 5 years which would make her intake about 1936 at age 22. The numbers line up pretty well if you consider she would’ve been newly engaged when she went into the Sanatorium. Well, when the box of photos came home and I started going through them, I was excited to see there were photos of what looked like her time spent in the Sanatorium, however with no names or dates or anything on the backs. A few featured the front of the building and after a little googling, I found that it must have been the Sanatorium Sonnevanck in Harderwijk, Netherlands. The Sanatoriums were split up by religion, so it also clued me in that Hilje and her family were of the Reformed religion (Gereformeerde). There are just two little photo booklets that show her life inside the Sanatorium, but they’re a precious glimpse into what was undoubtedly a difficult time. However, even while recovering from TB, she clearly had made friends and they managed to have a little fun from time to time. In the above photo, Hilje is on the far right with the “x” in the border of the photo. They appear to be having a meal together and paused for a group photo.

In another photo, the group of ladies appear to be having tea together. Hilje is fourth from the right in the front row, seated. Here you can see some of the ladies are in robes while others are dressed or in coats, presumably having come in from being out in the sun and open air. Hilje apparently lived in Pavilion III which was demolished sometime in the 1970s. Parts of Sonnevanck are still standing though and are used as a nursing home. It’s really neat to see these snippets of her daily life while so far away from home and family and I’m SO glad someone saw fit to hang on to them for so many years. My apologies for showing up late to dinner this week, but I’m catching up this week, I swear!