Sepia Saturday 344-b

Late again, and Sepia Monday doesn’t quite have the same ring, but here it is!  In another week of our, “From Here to There,” monthly theme, I have a ship coming into port.  These were taken by a member of the Jaarsma family,  and if I have my dates lined up right, they were sending a visitor, Fokke Brander, back home on the Nieuw Amsterdam on the Holland America Line at Hoboken, New Jersey.  I’ve had these photos on the side and had been doing a little work to sort out who this man labelled as “Brander” on the back of the photos was.  I finally fit him to a man named Fokke Brander, born 18 Jun 1900 in Obergum, Groningen, Netherlands and died 8 Oct 1961 in Uithuizen, Groningen, Netherlands.  He likely knew my husband’s grandparents since he lived near them when they lived in Holland, and came over to visit once they emigrated to the USA.
In the photo above, you can just barely make out the ship’s name behind the tugboat’s big “M” stack.  At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to identify this ship, but looking closely enough, I could make out a “N_EW AM” which led me to the Nieuw Amsterdam.  I knew the port had to be the Hoboken New Holland Line terminal just like all the other arrivals they captured, so this helped narrow things down.  Eventually, I found the departure manifest for the Nieuw Amsterdam which listed Fokke Brander as having left the USA on 8 Sep 1953 (Ancestry.com link), so the summer clothes in the photo make sense – it can still be quite warm in early September in the New York City area.

And here’s the man himself, Fokke Brander, standing on the right side with his luggage, shaking the hand of a man only identified as “Dijkhuis” in other photos.  The back of this photo is labelled, “Goed bye to Brander,” so I can safely assume this is the day he departed.  I haven’t yet been able to identify all the other people in the photo, but Mr. Brander shows up in a number of other photos with the other folks in this picture, so I assume he was making the rounds visiting everyone.  It’s pretty neat to have this sequence of photos to line up together and tell a story about Fokke and his visit to the USA!