neighbours at Hamborn

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 37:

Ernst Leopold the steel worker and Auguste from the East Prussian patchwork family settled in Hamborn (now part of Duisburg) and brought up their three sons there. Another son had died less than two months old. The Kosmowsky family lived in Knappenstraße 43 from 1927 (at least, possibly as early as 1925) until the late 1960s or early 70s, when the building was cleared to be demolished (strangely, we haven't been able to find a date for that).

The street harboured a tight-knit community – at the age of 77 the oldest surviving son was still able to compile a name of the “indigenous” residents with hundreds of names.

From this we learn that neighbours in the same house included Heinz, Karin and Christel Kuhwald, who appear to have been the same age as youngest son Werner. I believe we saw young Karin sitting on the steps in the entry about Tante Therese, although back then I didn’t know who she was.

Judging by the photos, young Werner got on well with the girls and they even appear to have gone on holidays together.

In vaguely chronological order, here's young Werner in ca. 1943 with all the Kuhwald kids and their mother, Anni:

I love this undated photo of Werner with Karin - note the photo on the wall which appears to show Anni with all three children, so this was probably taken in the Kuhwald flat:

Here he is with Christel, undated (the photo has this tilt, it's not my fault!):

and apparently on holiday in the mountains with both of them.

Other parties in Number 43 were Ursula and Erika Hölscher, Günter and Marianne Gruczka, and somebody called Herzog. Note that the list is from the perspective of the boys, so any first names are more likely to be those of the children of the respective households, rather than the parents.

On the list of indigenous residents we also find Auguste’s sister Johanna and her husband Fritz Krieger in number 51. I might type out the whole list at one point, but want to keep it separate from this post about the residents of number 43.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters from East Prussia
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter
35. bakery kids united
36. the four from the farm
37. neighbours at Hamborn

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

history of the world

I like to cover the multiple crises we're facing and creating ourselves in big picture sort of way, showing how things are connected around the globe, across the tree of life, and across time. Thus I was really keen to read The Earth transformed, Peter Frankopan's globalaccount of the history of the world linking in climate history and human history just about everywhere.

Understandably, it has turned out a big book, and I struggled with it a bit at the beginning especially. I think the problem is that the author aims for academic precision in multiple details in a situation where a broad brush and a bit more generalisation would be helpful. This was particularly a problem in the chapters on prehistory, where the evidence is thin and every other sentence includes a caveat such as "some scholars think that".

It gets better when the author reaches properly documented history where he feels more at home, so I managed to read about 2/3 of the thing by the time my deadline approached, and managed to write some meaningful paragraphs about my view of the history of the world and its climate. My long essay review is out now in the May issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Shared history

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 5, May 2023, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

I love the old school cover. Even though I have a feeling I already know how the story ends, I will still read the last third once I have a gap between my review deadlines.

the four from the farm

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 36:

We've seen Hedwig and her siblings as children and reunited as young adults, but I don't think we have any such pictures of her husband Paul Gellrich and his siblings who grew up on the Gellrich farm in Olbersdorf (which later became Groß-Olbersdorf). The closest we have is the group photo of Maria Gellrich's wedding which shows three of the four.

So let's introduce them separately in order of birth:

Josef (Seffe) born 1905

Seffe had a learning disability and could never live independently, but by keeping a low profile on his parents' farm he managed to get through the Nazi era without coming to harm. The photo above is cut out of the group photo taken at Maria's wedding. We don't have any other photos of him from the time in Silesia.

Here's a snap from his later life when he lived in an institution in Western Germany:

Dated 1981, this one is really outside the time range I normally consider for this series and I took the colours out of it, but along with a second snap of the same occasion it's all we have. He does look in good form for a 76 year old though.

Paul born 1910

He was the one missing on Maria's wedding photo (although present at that other wedding), but we have seen him previously on the occasion of his own wedding to Hedwig. Not many other photos of him apart from the wartime ones in uniform.

Maria (Mike) born 1914

Not many photos of her either, but I like the garden setting here.

Hedwig born 1917

We've seen her with her daughter Waltraud as the third Hedwig here (because she shared the name with both her mother and her sister-in-law).

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter
35. bakery kids united
36. the four from the farm

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

it's WNBR season

The UK's World Naked Bike Ride season kicks off this Saturday with the Portsmouth Ride, so I'll compile some relevant info here. I typically get the tip-offs from this page but don't find its alphabetical order very helpful, so I am sorting everything in chronological order, as long as it can be reached from Oxford in a day trip using public transport:

27.5. Portsmouth - weather forecast looks perfect for this one
4.6. Oxford - a new ride, first since 2014, has been announced here, and seems to be going ahead as a route map has been added recently. As of today, the weather forecast for this one looks good too.
10.6. London
11.6. Brighton
17.6. Cambridge, East London, Bruxelles
18.6. Bristol
2.7. Hastings
8.7. Cardiff
23.7. Portsmouth (again, after 27.5. looks like they're really planning two rides this summer)
5.8. Romford (East London)
2.9. Coventry

Outside my range, there will be several other rides in Essex and the north of England, check the WNBR Wiki for dates.

own photo, taken at the London WNBR 2019.

Sadly I didn't make it to any of last year's rides, so my list of rides I participated in is still unchanged:

2015 Bristol
2016 Bristol, London
2017 Bristol, Brighton
2018 London
2019 London

weird relatives

I've been writing about archaea on and off since the 1990s - there were quite a few of them kicking around at Regensburg biology department when I was there. Until very recently, this field was mainly of interest (especially to me) for its sheer weirdness. Which is why archaea star in some of my weird books, from Life on the Edge onwards.

Now, however, we know for certain that some of our ancestors were archaea. Specifically the Asgard group of archaea, which are extremely difficult to culture, have been shown to include the root out of which all eukaryotes evolved.

I hadn't followed this development all that closely in the last few years, but the recent report of the second Asgard species to be grown in culture has reminded me that I really should, so my latest feature on our ancestors among archaea is out now:

Archaic ancestors

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 10, 22. May 2023, Pages R377-R379

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Imaging work with Candidatus Lokiarchaeum ossiferum reveals that actin provides the cell with a complex cytoskeleton reminiscent of eukaryotes. (Image: Margot Riggi, The Animation Lab, University of Utah.)

30 years

as of today, I have lived in Oxford for 30 years, which also means more than half my life. Slightly scary thought, but I always thought if I have to get stuck somewhere, Oxford is a good place to get stuck. May 21 1993 was the day when our furniture (and Heinrich the cello) was delivered to our rented house in Derwent Avenue, so I count that as the arrival date, even though the rest of the family arrived the day before and I had spent a few more days at the youth hostel* in Jack Straws Lane before that. Here's one of the first two Oxford photos in our album, dated June 1993:

A bit of family perspective: Neither of my parents and none of my grandparents have lived in the same place as long as half their lifetime. Of my great-grandparents, Heinrich the cellist and his wife Maria did (after settling at Elberfeld/Wuppertal), Adam the baker and Anna Barbara did (at Lorsch), Heinrich the station master of Minden Stadt and Luise did, but adventurous Julius and wife Helene very emphatically didn't. For Julius, his years growing up in Krefeld were easily the longest stay, whereas for Helene her final 27 years in Bad Nauheim were. She lived to age 87, so that's not even a third.

Obviously, I could still tip the balance by moving somewhere else, but as even the Brexiteers haven't quite managed to kick me out, I guess I'll just hang on.

*Note re the youth hostel - a couple of years later, the building became a nursery and the new hostel behind the railway station was built which has now disappeared. So at least one major buildings has been built and knocked down in the time I've lived here. Now that is a scary thought.

ancient recipes

Taking a short break from the old photos, here are some ancient recipes for cooking, baking, and household things like polishing furniture and marble tiles.

I visited our family “museum” in March (the place where stuff from various households washed up over the last 90 years – including quite a few things dating from the 19th century). Between my grandmother’s gardening books, I discovered a handwritten book of recipes prepared by her mother-in-law Maria (wife of old cellist Heinrich who wrote all those romantic poems for her) mostly during the year in which they got married.

She signed the front page:

Marie Pfersching

Strassburg/Els.

1908

– after their wedding she would have lived in Dieuze, Lorraine, the small town to which Heinrich’s regiment was moved as a punishment in 1906.

There are some complexities here, so let me take you on a quick tour through the book which appears to have been written in four phases. There is an earlier signature on the front page, which Maria crossed out, so it is a bit hard to decipher but I read it as

Mieze Reinecke 1905

which, if true, is a peculiar name to go by, as Mieze is a nickname for a cat (also used in a not very respectful way for women) and Reinecke the name of the fox in old fables, and also a fairly common family name. So I am guessing the last name is genuine, but her real first name would have been something less colourful, like for instance, Maria. Which makes me wonder: perhaps younger Maria may have made up an alter ego for a diary project that never happened? But obviously, if you do know of any person called Mieze Reinecke or similar who was alive in 1905 I'd be grateful for a hint.

Phase 1, the first 19 pages of the book have a distinct style which I suspect suggests they were written by Mieze, not Maria. For instance, the headings all end with an exclamation mark, there are strange old-fashioned symbols for units that are no longer used after page 20, and the writing is ever so slightly less neat and elegant than what we know from Maria (who trained as a secretary in Strasbourg and probably would have made a bit more of an effort). There are no dates given on these pages.

Phase 2, from page 20 to 46 (the photo below shows pages 20-21, the very first line is carried over from page 19 in the old style). Here some recipes are marked with dates ranging from 19.4.1908 onwards. The recipe that straddles pages 20 to 21 is dated to 7.6.08, and the date of the following day, 8.6. appears five pages later, so I’m guessing that she did sometimes write in a lot of material on one day, which would explain that there aren’t all that many dates. The wedding was 8.10.1908, but isn’t mentioned in the book.

Photo of pages 20/21

Phase 3 from page 47 to 52 covers the year 1909 (first date is 1.3.09), which saw the birth of her son in July. Very few recipes, and more household and cleaning concoctions than actual edible stuff. Notably, nothing whatsoever on how to feed or otherwise deal with a baby. Then there must be a 5-year gap, because:

Phase 4 starts under the headline “war recipes”. These are more difficult to read and headings no longer marked, so I’ll decipher them some other time. After a few pages, normal layout returns, but some entries continue to be marked as war recipes with the acronym KR for Kriegs-Rezepte.

There is an alphabetical index for phases 1-3, covering 190 recipes. So together with the war recipes yet to be deconvoluted, I guess we have over 250 entries. I don’t think I’ll transcribe them all, but I’ll paste in some examples below (in German):

Transcription of the recipes shown in the photo:

Paprika-Kartoffeln.
Zu einem Kilo Kartoffeln, die in ziemlich dicke Scheiben geschnitten werden,
dünstet man in beiläufig 120g Fett vier große Zwiebeln, läßt selbe semmel-
braun werden, gibt 3-2 Messerspitzen voll Paprika und gleich darauf die Erd-
äpfel hinein, rührt selbe gut um, salzt sie genügend, stäubt ein wenig Meh
darunter und gießt so viel Fleischsuppe darauf, daß die Erdäpfel ganz über-
deckt werden, bis sie weich sind, wobei man darauf achte, daß sie ziemlich
viel Saft behalten.

Kalbfleischklösse.
1Pfd Kalbfleisch wird mit 125 g Speck sehr fein gehackt, ¼ Pfd abgeriebene und in
Wasser ausgedrückte Semmel, 2 Eigelb, Salz, Pfeffer gut vermengt, davon sehr
große Klöße geformt und in heißem Fette gebacken. Dann wird eine Tunke
von Butter, Mehl, Schnittlauch und Petersilie darüber gegeben. 19.4.08

Maitrank.
Man nimmt in eine Schüssel zwei Hände voll frischen Waldmeister, 750 g
in Stücke zerschlagenen Zucker, gießt vier Flaschen weißen Wein darauf, doch
so daß zuerst nur eine kleine Quantität den Zucker auflöst und der übrige Wein
nach ungefähr zehn Minuten vollends dazu kommt. Man deckt die Schüssel zu
und läßt es ¼ Stunde anziehen. Man kann das Getränk durch ein Sieb gießen,
doch ist es besser man stellt es mit den Kräutern auf. Auch kann man eine in
Scheiben geschnittene Orange hineintun.

Mürber Teig.
340g feines Mehl, 250g ausgewaschene Butter, 100g durchgesiebter Zucker, 1 Ei,
2 Eßlöffel Rum, 2 Eßlöffel Wasser. Die Butter wird zu Sahne gerieben, Zucker, Ei,

21

Rum, Wasser und Mehl allgemach dazuzugeben, noch eine Weile gerührt und
zu verschiedenen Obstkuchen benutzt. Auch kann man den Teig erst backen und
dann verschiedenes Obst auflegen. 7.6.08

Kerbelsuppe.
Man wasche und schneide drei Hände voll Kerbelkraut, lasse 100g Butter heiß
werden, dämpfe darin das Kraut, streue 2 Löffel Mehl darüber, röste dies ein
wenig mit, gießt Fleischbrühe auf und gebe beim Anrichten Rahm und
Muskat dazu.

Kirschen in Dunst einzumachen.
Die Kirschen werden abgepflückt und in Gläser gefüllt. In jedes Glas gibt man
2 Eßlöffel Zucker, schließt dieselben luftdicht, umwickelt sie mit Stroh, stellt sie
vorsichtig, daß die Gläser einander nicht berühren, in den Wasserkessel, feuert
so lange, bis das Wasser kocht, läßt die Kirschen dann ruhig darin erkalten
und stellt sie an einen kühlen, luftigen Ort.

Sandtorte. (Sehr gut.)
Nimm ein Pfund gute Schmalzbutter und rühre sie eine gute halbe Stunde, dann
gib nach und nach 12 Eigelb hinein, dann gib löffelweise 1 Pfund gestoßenen
Zucker, 1 Pfund Puder und abgeriebene Citronen abwechselnd hinein, auch 1-2
Eßlöffel voll Rum oder Arrak und fein gestoßene Vanille. Nachdem es 1 Stunde
lang gerührt ist, gib noch den Schnee hinzu und backe es bei gelinder Hitze
2 Stunden lang.

Füllsel für die Kalbsbrust.
70g Butter werden gerührt, 3 Eidotter, Muskat, Salz, 375g geriebene
Semmel, 1/4 l. Rahm und die zu Schnee geschlagenen Eiweiße beigegeben.

Note the four bottles of white wine going into the May Punch (the third recipe) - it doesn't say how many guests she was catering for but it sounds like quite the party. Here is a modern recipe in English to compare (two bottles of dry white and one of fizz).

This discovery will come in very handy to fill a few more pages in the musical family history I am still adding to. Until now I had very little info about life in Dieuze, which was a conspicuous gap after all I found out about the Strasbourg years, so now at least I know what the newlyweds had to eat and how they polished their marble tiles and nutwood furniture.

bakery kids united

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 35:

We saw the three Geppert children from the Dörndorf bakery looking cute in the photo from 1918, but as Willi went missing and Hedwig didn't get on with Emma, we weren't expecting to see many pictures of them together as adults. However, a set of rather poor quality photos has now emerged where they are all together. Here's the three of them (Emma on the left):

Then, from the same series, in the same garden, all three posing with an unidentified young man:

Then Willi and Hedwig with the same mystery man (a second print of this photo has the picture reduced to a heart shape, so it would kind of make sense if the young man was Emma's boyfriend):

And thanks to this set we have now a better idea of what Emma looked like as a young woman (a lot like Willi, I think!), so could identify her in other photos including this one with Willi and presumably her husband Wilhelm Krieger (born in Heidelberg in 1912) and her son Klaus Dieter (born Breslau 1942), which I shared before in the entry about Willi without realising who the others were:

At first glance I thought this could still be the same man as in the earlier photos but maybe not. Legend has it that Emma moved to Berlin (perhaps following the example of her cousin Lotti Geppert?), but soon came back pregnant and found herself a husband willing to overlook that little accident. Obviously it's not impossible that this helpful person was somebody she already knew befort that escape attempt but we have no information to confirm that.

There are also numerous photos of her alone, to be reviewed in a future entry.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter
35. bakery kids united

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

animal health services

We know a lot about how animals protect themselves against scary big predators, but not quite so much regarding how they keep safe from smaller enemies such as pathogens and parasites, both by instinctive avoidance (ecology of disgust) and also by behaviours that can be described as self-medication.

I've rounded up a few recent examples from this underappreciated part of ecology and poked at the question of where in human evolution ecology ends and the history of medicine begins.

The resulting feature is out now:

Animal health services

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 9, 8. May 2023, Pages R333-R335

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Great bustards (Otis tarda) have been shown to preferentially consume two species of plants during their mating season that may protect them from both parasites and pathogenic fungi. (Photo: © Carlos Palacín.)

those were the days

In the sixth month of the great violin adventure, I've spent a lot of time playing folk at this year's Folk Weekend Oxford and also at the first bandstand session of the season, and not quite so much time playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik (K525) as I had planned, although we did play that at Cowley Orchestra this week, which was a nice reminder. I'll get back to that.

Christa the violin making her debut appearance at the bandstand on May 1st.

Meanwhile, as we were jamming random show tunes at the tail end of the bandstand session, it occurred to me that Those were the days might make a nice fiddle tune. Trying it out I realised I really love indulging in the dynamics and tempo changes and going a bit wild with it. It even works an octave down - lots of scope to play around.

Looking up the history of it I learned that it was originally a Russian folk song, which makes sense. Also, it is another addition to my collection of songs I heard in French as a child - it was recorded by Dalida in 1968 as Le temps des fleurs, and I did recognise bits of that now.

Although I've messed around with it for a week, this isn't quite presentable yet. So in lieu of a progress report, here's a video of a Scandi tune I played at the bandstand and recorded this weekend: Äppelbo Gånglåt

becoming Peter

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 34:

Of Peter the future customs officer and coffee confiscator we have very few photos growing up at Lorsch. We've seen him as a little boy in this family portrait, then as a teenager here, and that leads us already to the young adult portrait photos I'm rounding up here, all undated.

So in no particular order, he had his portrait taken with a chair:

... with a sword of unknown significance (born in 1900, he may have been called up to serve at the tail end of the first world war, but I don't know of any actual war experience then):

... and finally with his girlfriend Frieda, possibly on the occasion of their engagement (although there is also a studio portrait from that time):

I'm loving the geology in this last one, but not sure where or when it was taken. As the two met in Minden, where one of Peter's colleagues was lodging with Frieda's parents, I am thinking this could be to do with the nearby Weserdurchbruch, where the river Weser cuts through the mountain range. The cool thing about this is that the river Weser really did cut through what was previously a continuous mountain range, at a time when glaciers blocked its previous route.

PS What we know about Peter growing up is that he was musical and keen to play the violin, but the struggling baker's family didn't have the funds for that. The closest he got was a cigarbox instrument lovingly crafted by his dad (but sadly lost). But he did manage to catch the attention of a certain young pianist, above, and when he later did have the funds he bought the violin I have recently rescued for their second daughter, who didn't really get on with it.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

becoming Frieda

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 33:

We saw Frieda as a young child here, before that piano came into her life. Now to carry on the story, here are some pictures from her adolescence. She attended the Städtisches Lyzeum Minden 1914-1917 (ie until age 14), and then the conservatoire in nearby Bückeburg (founded just in time in 1913 as Fürstliche Musik Hochschule, in the last blaze of glory of one of the many micro-states that ceased to exist in 1918).

First another cutout from what may have been a school photo:

and another even smaller cutout, literally thumbnail size. With several attempts at scanning, this was the best I could get out of it:

Then Frieda with a younger friend who I think might be her cousin Sophie Brunschier (Sophie was five years younger than Frieda, so I guess this fits):

... and here is the young lady she became:

Sadly we have no adolescence pics with the piano which she had from age 10 or so.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.