Thursday, March 16, 2023

a gathering at Gellrichs

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 27.

here we have Hedwig Scholz again, matron of the household with three Hedwigs (her husband Paul Gellrich sr. is around but doesn't show his face very often!), although we only saw two of them in the last entry (the third one finally emerged here). The year is 1944, and the location is the same as the last time we visited (in 1941/42), with the conspicuous low brick wall shielding the steps to the door, and a scaffolding for vines under the window - probably the Scholz/Gellrichs' farm at Gross-Olbersdorf:

We have Hedwig Scholz sitting at the front (right) and looking as grumpy as she always does. Behind her on the right, carrying the baby, is her son in law, Max Fuss, but there's no sign of the baby's mother Maria (Mike). As for everybody else, we are entirely clueless as to who these people are. On the far left, the young woman was in the photos of the three Hedwigs entry but eventually turned out not to be the third Hedwig I was looking for. The older woman sitting front left also pops up in other photos, but remains anonymous. same for the woman standing behind her. All very mysterious people.

To mix things up a bit, here is a second photo obviously taken on the same occasion, but with participants shuffled around just a bit. We now see Hedwig's daughter Maria holding the child - so presumably she took the first photo and the woman who now disappeared took the second.

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

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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

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.

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