A curious little photo album emerged from the belongings of my late inlaws, with photos from Dörndorf, Kreis Frankenstein, Silesia (where the kids form the bakery grew up), but the owner's stamp is a name we don't recognise, and the only two photos of people we know have probably been added to it later. Kreis Frankenstein is now Ząbkowice County in the south of Poland.
The album is roughly half the size of a paperback book, and designed to hold around 50 photos of format 6.5 x 9 cm, which can be slotted into the pages. The rubber stamp at the front says:
Fritz Grötzner
Dörndorf
Kreis Frankenstein
At a push, the name could be Grützner, which would be a name that gives you more search results in Silesia than Grötzner. As the ink of the stamp has filled in the middle of the letter I read as an o, I can't tell whether it is open or closed, but it doesn't have a leg on the right, as the letter u should probably have.
What we get in the album is a lovely portrait of the little church of Dörndorf, where Hedwig Geppert and Paul Gellrich got married (more about the church, which was built in 1777, here):
as well as a view of a house that has Fritz's name above the door, but sadly I can't read the line below so don't know what he's selling.
The only person to have as many as three individual portraits in the album is the one shown below, so I'll guess that this is Fritz G. His portraits appear near the beginning of the album, and he may or may not be included in some of the later group photos.
Obviously, I had to pick the one with a musical instrument. Elsewhere in the album, there is also a big bass drum dangling from the back of a car that has landed in a ditch. (That accident is the most dramatic thing documented in the album.)
Most of the photos appear to be related to a road building project, and one of these has the little church of Dörndorf on the horizon, so I'll assume that the entire project was a road that led into the village and it all happened reasonably close to it. A couple of photos show a flooded landscape, but even those are related to the road building, as a pair of matching photos with and without floodwater reveals. The lorries used in the road building have number plates starting with I K, which is as it should be for private vehicles registered in Silesia. The Roman numeral I applies across Prussia (as opposed to II for Bavaria), and the letter K specifies Silesia.
In picture 21 we can read on the side of the lorry the name of a road building company involved in the works:
Hugo Jaensch Stra[ssenbau]
Jauer Fernruf 5
I have added most of the photos to a new flickr album created for this, just leaving out a couple that have too many nazi uniforms for my taste, and the three that are almost certainly later additions. The genuine ones have only the brand of the photographic paper on the back (Agfa Lupex), whereas the cuckoos come with the stamps of different shops that processed the prints.
On flickr I also have a postcard of the village, with views of both the church and the bakery.
I'm tagging this "every picture" even though there may not have been a family member in the album originally, but there must have been some sort of connection otherwise it wouldn't be here. Make this an every picture special issue.
And as always, all hints and clues appreciated.
