sepia saturday – Page 7

Sepia Saturday 314

By Sheetar 23 January 2016 20 January 2016

For this week’s Sepia Saturday, the prompt image was a fairly old family photo. While mine is probably from about 1924, the family history here is a pretty neat story that I’ve been researching heavily over the past couple of months for my husband’s side of the family. Before I get too far, let’s introduce the people in the photo.

L to R, Back Row: Cornelius Herman Tanis, Gertrude Meyer, Jessie Meyer, Harry Meyer, Jeanette Tanis, Jenetta Meyer
L to R, Front Row: Josephine Tanis, Alida Meyer, Johannes Meyer, Jacob Meyer, John Meyer Jr., Richad Meyer, Alida Grootveld, Helen Tanis, Gertrude Tanis.

Johannes Meyer was born 3 August 1878 in Stiens, Leeuwarderadeel, Friesland, Netherlands. He came to the USA, arriving on 4 May 1893, with his sister Grietje, her husband Frans de Haan, a sister Willemke, and Grietje and Frans’ two children Pieter and Jan de Haan. The rest of the family followed later and they ended up living in Passaic County, New Jersey. On 26 November 1902, Johannes married Gertrude Lena Catherine Grootveld and had 7 children seen in the photo above with the last name Meyer. Sadly, Gertrude died on 18 May 1916. Just a few short months after Gertrude’s death, Alida Grootveld, sister of Gertrude, lost her husband, Herman Tanis on 15 August 1916. Alida and Herman had been living in Wisconsin for a number of years, and in 1920, the census shows she was living as a widow in Illinois. Shortly after the census, Johannes Meyer married his deceased wife’s sister, Alida on 10 September 1920 and brought her and her children back to New Jersey to make one big blended family. Together they had one son, Richard Meyer, born 1 September 1922 (the baby in the photo).

I suppose circumstances lined up just right, with Alida’s husband and Johannes’ wife passing away around the same time, that it made sense for two large families to join together and combine resources to support each other and since they already knew each other, so hey, why not? Getting into the details of the photo, the girls are all wearing basically the same dress or variations on the same dress. The older three boys are in suits, and John Meyer Jr. is in a lovely sailor outfit, tying us neatly into the prompt photo this week.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 313

By Sheetar 16 January 2016 15 January 2016

On time this week for Sepia Saturday! The prompt post featured two French boys, and here I have two Dutch girls. On the left is Ellechien Dijkema (1912-1974) and on the right is Hilje Dijkema (1914-1997), my husband’s grandmother. It’s the oldest photo we have of her where her face is clearly visible and it’s quite a treasure! The girls are the youngest of 8 children, only 6 of whom made it past their 18th birthday. While the image doesn’t show it, the girls spent the majority of their early lives on the canals around Groningen, Netherlands with their father who ran a barge loaded with deliveries of peat logs for fuel, so the girls were no strangers to life on a boat. Hilje later married and even took a transatlantic voyage to the USA where she lived till her death. The back of the photo has a mark for the photo studio, Foto Steenmeijer (Heerestr. 421, Groningen) and is stamped in purple ink with the date 18 July 1927, so Hilje would’ve been 13 here. I absolutely love the details in the photo from the necklaces on the girls to their shoes, the bracelet on Ellechien, both of them with rings on, and the almost unseeable print on Hilje’s dress. As for the photo studio location, we probably walked past it while we were in Groningen this past Fall! There’s a bunch of great information about the photographer here (unfortunately in Dutch, but Google Translate handles it pretty well!)

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 312

By Sheetar 9 January 2016 7 January 2016

The prompt image for Sepia Saturday this week featured a group of men playing, “Push Ball.” It’s a game I’ve never heard of before, but taken as a group of men, my image fits in! Something about the prompt image immediately brought this one to mind, so I’m going with it. The image is from a set taken by Earl William Powis (15 Oct 1896 – 26 Mar 1973) while he was serving in the Navy during WWI (1917-1919, stationed at Yorktown, Virginia. It doesn’t look like Earl is in this photo, so I’m assuming he was the photographer and took a photo of a few of his friends to send home. The back has no label or precise date, so all we know is that they’re Navy men stationed at Yorktown and a two year span which isn’t terrible in terms of identifying an unlabelled photo!

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 311

By Sheetar 8 January 2016 8 January 2016

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.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 310

By Sheetar 7 January 2016 7 January 2016

Well, after a very busy holiday season, I’m finally catching up on a back log of posting. This is Sepia Saturday from before the annual winter break. Seated in the chair, examining the manual for his new Polaroid Land Camera 250, is Leon Kitko, my grandfather. The Christmas tree is decorated with garland and tinsel, and all the unwrapped gifts sit under the tree. Christmas was a big deal for his second wife, Romayne (Greenaway) Kitko, and there are tons and tons of photos of the Christmases they spent together over the years. I’m fairly certain the camera that goes with the manual followed me home in the last few years after Leon and Romayne both passed, so it’s neat to have this photo to connect it to Leon. It’s also a photo I’d absolutely expect to see – Leon with the furrowed brow, intently reading a manual, feet up, dirty socks just pulled out of his work boots on the floor. The date on the back of the photo is 25 December 1967, and the photo is a polaroid as well.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 309

By Sheetar 12 December 2015 11 December 2015

For Sepia Saturday this week, our prompt image features a soldier eating a donut. I’d been itching to include the above photo for quite a while, so I decided to go with the theme of eating and include it! The folks in the photo are clearly having a good time, and you can almost hear the laughter burst out of the image. It’s actually a double exposure, and the back has the label, “English Lesson.” At first I had a good laugh – if this is an English lesson, sign me up! Then I realized that you can see a bookcase, names on a chalk board, and students hunched over their desks in the far left of the photo. The foreground of people laughing and drinking out of glasses is definitely a second exposure. From the names on the board, it appears that this was taken after the Jaarsma family arrived in the USA from the Netherlands, so sometime after 1951. I have to imagine that the more jovial scene was in a dark restaurant or cafe that allowed the other image with the bookcases and chalkboard to show up in the spots the flash didn’t touch. I don’t recognize any faces, but the names on the chalkboard are clearly readable, at least a few of them. The class would’ve been somewhere in Northern New Jersey near Paterson, and a quick search on Ancestry.com led me to find an Elvira Lucaire living in Ridgewood, NJ in 1960, and she may be the Ellie Lucaire on the chalkboard list. I’m including the other names here in the case that the magic of the internet brings someone looking for their ancestor to this photo! Janet Lehmann, Ellie Lucaire, Marge Lesch, Marilyn Kozlowski, Liz Lee, Nancy Kime, Muriel Knapp, Dot Lynch.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 308

By Sheetar 5 December 2015 2 December 2015

The prompt image for Sepia Saturday 308 featured a man walking along a beach with his dog. I thought about it for a second, and since my family lived mostly the center of Pennsylvania over the last 100 years, an area with no sandy beaches, I decided I had plenty of photos of men with dogs and took the easy way out this week! Pictured above is Leon Kitko with “Tramp.” The back of the photo says that it was taken in May 1971 and that Tramp was Lynn Adams’ dog. If I’ve got my facts right, the dog wasn’t Lynn Adams’ for very long and Leon basically ended up adopting the dog since he spent more time with Leon than anyone else. There are bunches of photos of Tramp in the collection of Polaroids from the 1970s proving that he was a beloved pet and companion for a number of years. Anyone who has had a family dog knows exactly what I’m talking about, and we have two rescue pups who share our home. Just like grandpa, we’ve taken countless photos of our dogs and share them with anyone (and everyone). While people might think it’s odd to save photos of grandpa’s pets, I feel a sort of nostalgia for them even though I never knew any of these pets. Beyond that, the photos work to paint a bigger picture about the sort of person Grandpa was – all the photos of pets show he was an animal lover. To me, they’re not just a mass of photos of pets, but photos taken with love to remember a life shared with furry companions.

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 307

By Sheetar 28 November 2015 24 November 2015

Sometimes the propmt image for Sepia Saturday isn’t quite an exact match to the subject, but more matches the feeling and composition of the photo like we have here. The prompt image featured a group of kids playing some sort of game, standing in a circle. The girls in the photo above aren’t standing or playing any sort of apparent game, but they’re sitting in a circle just the same. At the center of the circle is presumably the teacher or leader and dthe girls all look to be in their early to mid teens. Hilje Dijkema, my husband’s grandmother, is at the very far left of the photo, leaning on her elbow. The photo was likely taken in or around Uithuizen, Groningen, Netherlands and the back of the photo says, “Meisjes Vereiniging, 1931,” which translates roughly to, “Girls Club,” and dates the photo to 1931 which makes Hilje 17 years old. Hilje didn’t go to school beyond about 5th grade, but the family was very religious so this could have been some sort of church club for girls. I don’t see any bibles or books though, and I don’t know who any of the other girls are. It’s still a charming photo of the group of them and I rather like how they’re all sitting neatly in a circle.