Tag: jaarsma

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.

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).

Our prompt image this week featured a kitchen and oven  showing off fresh baked goods.  I really have nothing precisely like it, but I do have some more recent photos that show the aftermath of cooking, the cleaning!  Going to a rather not-sepia zone this week, we have two photos of dishwashers.  In about 1984, Bouwe Jaarsma and his wife Baukje Zijlstra came to the USA to visit Bouwe’s siblings, one of whom was my husband’s grandfather, Doede Jaarsma.  At some point during their visit, after a meal, they jumped right in and started washing dishes.  This is a scan from a pile of negatives, so the quality isn’t terrific, but it’s a wonderful, candid snapshot of their visit.  Even though they were the guests, they ended up (whether voluntary or assigned) the task of washing dishes that evening.  Even though not Sepia, it still fits in nicely with the theme and lets me connect a few genealogical dots in these recently scanned photos!

My first thought on seeing the prompt image for this Sepia Saturday was WOW, I’ve got nothing.  Then I started flipping through the photos from my husband’s family and BINGO, there this one was.  The back reads, “Mom, first customer at Grand Union.”  I’m not sure which Grand Union or what year this was, but it’s probably in the 1950s in northeastern New Jersey, and the woman is my husband’s grandmother, Hilje “Hilda” (Dijkema) Jaarsma.  I can’t seem to find any newspaper articles in NJ mentioning the event, or at least not any indexed and scanned online.  Still, it’s a great photo of an interesting event, and is completely relevent to the prompt image for this week!  What a great chance to get to use this photo for a Sepia Saturday.

Another Sepia Saturday is already upon us!  This week brings us a prompt image of a beautiful beach, but unfortunately I have no family that lived on/near beaches or who took and saved photos from a beach vacation.  We’re not a beach/shore kind of people, it seems!  However, my husband’s family came to the USA from the Netherlands on a boat in 1951 which fits the bill for at least the “sea” part of the theme.  On February 13, 1951, the S.S. Volendam departed from Rotterdam, Netherlands, bound for America.  Two families who apparently didn’t know eachother prior to the journey, met and became friends on the 12 day journey, or friends enough to take a picture and share it later on.  The photo looks like it was taken on board the ship, on their first day according to the inscription on the back.  Google Translate tells me the inscription, written in Dutch, says, “To remember the boat trip to America,” and is signed the Jansens Family.  I hadn’t heard the name before, they weren’t family friends that I knew of, so I set out to figure out who this Jansens Family was.  By luck, they were listed just above my husband’s family on the passenger list (link).  My husband’s grandparents are in the back row, 2nd and 3rd in from the left – Hilje “Hilda” Dijkema (1914-1997) and Doede “Douglas” Jaarsma (1911-1995).  The head of the Jansens family was Pieter Jansens and his wife, Janna, along with  10  of their 18 children.  I recently got in contact with a descendant of Jacobus (the man in the back row on the far left with the camera bag) who filled me in on some details of the family who ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  The Jaarsma family went to northern New Jersey and pretty much stayed in the area.  It’s sweet that the Jansens family sent along a copy of the photo after arriving at their destination, and that Hilda and Douglas kept it all these years.  It was really neat to connect with a descendant of the Jansens family and share the photo back with them, and I’m happy to share it as this Sepia Saturday sails off into the sunset.

I didn’t have any arts and crafts photos in the family archives, but I do have TONS of classroom photos.  Here’s a slightly newer photo, but it’s from my husband’s side of the family from Holland, dated on the back as 11 September 1946.  As far as location, I found a very similary photo here, including what look to be the same teachers.  My husband’s uncle is in the photo, 2nd row from the back, 2nd child from the right.  It’s interesting to note that there seem to be three teachers or at the very least one teacher and two aides.  The kids are wearing a mix of regular shoes and wooden clogs, and there are a few toys in the front to set the stage.  The kids also seem to be wearing some beautiful handknit sweaters and vests!  Family stories tell us that my husband’s grandmother made a lot of their clothes as kids (knit and crochet), and being this was just after the end of World War II, it makes sense that certain necessities were a little harder to find.  David (Douwe) Jaarsma would’ve been a month shy of 5  when this was taken, so I have to imagine it was a kindergarten class.  Sadly, David passed away two years ago this month, and he’s greatly missed by the family.