open doors

Every picture tells a story No. 40

Season finale - as the list of entries gets a bit unwieldy, I am going to close this door and open another one in a few weeks time.

Auguste from the East Prussian patchwork family, who worked in Allenburg at the bottom of the steps moved to Hamborn on the river Rhine (now part of Duisburg) in October 1922, aged 24. The following year she married fellow East Prussian Ernst Leopold and stayed at Hamborn the rest of her life.

She lived there at four different addresses over the years, here she is entering the house in Knappenstraße 43, where she lived with her family from the 1920s through to the mid 1960s, in a photo dating from the 1950s:

Knappe in this context refers to a skilled miner working below ground. Although it's emphatically not named after a poet or writer, the Knappenstraße is part of the poets' quarter (see also this link), a large housing development built between 1905 and 1924 for workers of the rapidly growing steel and mining industries. A photo of the street appears in this document on page 22.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series - season 1 now complete:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia
15. the case of the missing grandmother
16. checkpoint Glaner Brücke 1929(ish)
17. finding Mimi
18. five sisters, five decades
19. happy at home
20. gone milking
21. steel workers
22. field work
23. what to wear at Porta Westfalica
24. a classic convertible
25. at the bottom of the steps
26. a forester's family
27. the Kaiser visits Allenburg
28. teaching the 'deaf-mute'
29. a guard dog called Schluck
30. party like it's 1956
31. the case of the mysterious uncle
32. three Hedwigs and a baby
33. a lost generation
34. lost illusions
35. pursued by a bear
36. three daughters
37. happy 240th birthday
38. three sisters
39. wedding styles
40. open doors

Alternatively, you can use this twitter thread as an illustrated table of contents.

In a somewhat roundabout way, this series relates to my research for the family history music memoir I have now completed in a first version.