meet the Weitze family

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 29.

Last year I discovered this lovely mother and daughters among our piles of family photos:

Inscribed on the back with the names Käthe, Karin and Brigitte Weitze. Bokeloh Mai 1947. To the best of our knowledge, they are not related to anybody covered in this series, and at the time I assumed that Hedwig Geppert (now Gellrich and widowed) must have met them when she arrived at nearby Brase, Lower Saxony, after eviction from Groß-Olbersdorf, Silesia (note that Hedwig got separated from her parents in the process and it took her years to find out where they had landed). On that basis I didn't include the photo in this series then (although I did put it on flickr in the hope of finding out more).

Now, however Mrs. Weitze (presumably Käthe because one of the girls is identified as Brigitte on a separate portrait) has turned up in further photos, both earlier and later. Here she is with her husband in uniform, so presumably during WW2:

The inscription is: Krummhübel / Talsperre
Fam. Baumann
Frau Fink m/ Sohn
Fam. Weitze
I think Käthe in the light dress is clearly recognisable.

Krummhübel (Karpacz) is a mountain resort in the Riesengebirge near Schneekoppe, and the terminus of a small railway line, the Riesengebirgsbahn. So that's definitely Silesia.

Here they are reunited after the war, I assume the child is the younger one from the top photo, as she has smooth hair and the older appeared to have natural curls. Judging by the child's size, I guess we're looking at the early 1950s now. On second thoughts, this is a different bloke now, looking at his earlobes. Very confusing. This photo isn't labelled but stamped by a shop in Bocholt which is the nearest town from Vardingholt, where Hedwig moved to reunite with her mother in 1953 (her father had died in 1952).

And here they are again looking a bit older, I guess, so maybe late 50s or even 1960s? This one is stamped by a shop in Kiel.

So it's beginning to look like a quite enduring connection that lasted across the eviction from Silesia as reflected in four photos from four very different places quite distant geographically. We can't rule out the possibility that Mrs. Weitze may have been Hedwig's cousin, considering that we discovered her cousin Lotti Geppert only very recently.

Gedbas.de seems to think that the hotspots of Weitze families are in Brandenburg, in places like Fürstenwalde and Weißenspring. Investigations on the wider web aren't helped by the fact that there is a military antiques dealership with the name Weitze.

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

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.

silver linings

It's three years since some political leaders learned about exponentials and we all started the journey of discovering the lockdowns, contact tracing, zoom meetings, PPE crises, and all the other side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. There have also been some silver linings, and one of them is that it has given a massive boost to medical research. We will soon see other mRNA vaccines for instance, and even the fight against malaria, a disease that has nothing in common with Covid, stands to benefit from some silver linings of the covid cloud, after a setback at the beginning of the pandemic.

So I've written a feature on the post-pandemic fresh start in the malaria field, which is out now:

New beginnings for malaria research

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 6, 27. March 2023, Pages R203-R205

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

The photo shows Anopheles stephensi, a mosquito species that is native to Asia but has recently been linked to urban outbreaks of malaria in Africa. (Photo: Jim Gathany.)

farm work at Bad Landeck

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 28.

Hedwig Geppert (the milkmaid in this entry) worked on various farms in Silesia during the years 1935 to 1940, when she married Paul Gellrich. On several occasions she found work in Bad Landeck (today: Lądek-Zdrój ). One employer marked in her work record was Erich Straube, Auenstr. 17 - clearly legible because he had a big fat rubber stamp for this information. The other entries are hand-written, so as best I can decipher them, they may be called: Paul Wegner; Elfriede Freudenreich; Franz Seipel; Kurt Müller. These are all at Bad Landeck, I skipped a few names based elsewhere.

Now we have a lovely series of photographs stamped by the drugstore at Bad Landeck, showing Hedwig and male colleagues working in the field in glorious sepia tones:

I'm sure there must be a 19th century painting with a very similar scene and composition?

NB it's the late 1930s but machines are still driven by real horse power ...

... or by real man power.

Here's another one, also from Landeck but from a separate film, without the sepia tones.

The Bad Landeck set also includes two portraits of a woman unknown to us - I read her attitude in these pictures as indicating that she may have been the boss of the farm workers? In which case the whole series may relate to the farm of Elfriede Freudenreich, where Hedwig worked 1.4.1937 to 23.11.1938. That's the longest period she has worked on the same farm, so it would make sense to get some photos of the colleagues and even the boss? Here's the better photo of the two:

Looking at Gedbas.de, there are tons of Freudenreich people in Alsace, but not that many in Silesia. There appear to have been some in Kreis Frankenstein, in places like Schlottendorf and Alt Altmannsdorf, which is interesting to us, and even better this Josef Freudenreich born 1868 in Schlottendorf died in Bad Landeck in 1935. So conceivably Elfriede could have been his daughter and have inherited the farm from him.

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

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.

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

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

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.

the lynx effect

We are officially in the decade of ecosystem restoration and the top predators of a given ecosystem obviously have a role to play in that. However, reintroduction of carnivores like lynx, wolf and bear often faces fierce resistance from those humans who have usurped their roles of killing the herbivores.

A couple of new papers on the genetic health of Eurasian lynx populations in Europe served as the excuse to have a look at the situation of the typical carnivores of the northern latitudes and any attempts at reintroducing them.

The feature is out now:

Caring for carnivores

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 5, 13. March 2023, Pages R159-R162

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

The Eurasian lynx, although not endangered, is a keystone species missing from much of western Europe. (Photo: Nicky Pe/Pixabay.)

a semi-mysterious aunt

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 26.

Aunt Therese, who appears in the photos below, is semi-mysterious because we know whose aunt she is, but not whose sister she is. She could be a sister of Ernst Leopold the steelworker or of his wife Auguste, or indeed one of Auguste's half siblings from the earlier patches of the East Prussian patchwork family. Thus, Therese's maiden name can have been any of these three: Kosmowsky, Faust, Wittke.

Ernst and Auguste's son Fritz labelled the photos below quite carefully, saying that the lady on the right is called Therese Vietz and is his aunt. However, in a list of allegedly all the siblings of his father he didn't include her. In a list of the siblings of Auguste, he didn't include her either, but at least he didn't claim the list to be complete and he admitted to being a bit hazy about the earlier patches of the patchwork. Hence my guess that she might fit in there but we don't really know. We don't know either what became of the Mr Vietz she appears to have married.

So, well, here comes the semi-mysterious aunt first in 1950 outside Auguste's home in Knappenstraße 43, Duisburg-Hamborn (we've seen Auguste entering that very same door here). The other woman is a neighbour called Frau Majer, who lived in number 51, where Auguste's sister Johanna also lived with her husband Fritz Krieger (both appeared here). The girl is Karin and the dog Molly. No idea who these two belong to.

I love the light in this photo.

And then with Fritz's wife Mathilde in their flat in 1953:

Looking for Vietz people on GedBas, I found this family which was active in Kreis Wehlau, like Auguste's paternal line, and featured a marriage with a Witt woman (one of the daughters of the Wittke patch in East Prussia also married a Witt), so it appears entirely possible that Therese found her husband in East Prussia. The most recent Vietz in that database is Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Vietz 1872-1915.

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

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.

old aunts and young children

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 25.

We have seen the three daughters from the bakery Adam Eberle at Lorsch as children here and two as young women here, but of course the surviving family remember them as old aunts who shared a household and a famously Spartan lifestyle. I was told they pinched every penny and never threw any food away even if it had gone off, even though they had considerable savings in the bank and owned property.

So here are some old aunty pics with select members of my generation, first all three in August 1961 with one of my cousins. I think this is the back of the house in Bahnhofstraße 27 where the bakery was many years before:

Aunt Anna worked as a community nurse and apparently never took off her uniform:

from the same set a scene at the dinner table to appreciate the interiors:

... and then Anna and Babette in August 1964 with yours truly (not sure of the location):

Dina had died in 1963.

NB this is my debut appearance in the series. In series 1, I had set my birth year as the cutoff, but in season 2 I loosened the rules to allow pictures from the mid and late 1960s as well.

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

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.

back to Suzuki school

Four months into the adventure sparked by my aunt's ancient violin, I feel I'm ready to use more interesting fingerings than the 1-2-3 that will get you through most folk tunes. So I was glad to discover vols 2 and 3 of Suzuki violin school at Oxfam. There is a big overlap in the pieces used at the same stage in the cello school, so I have much of the music in my head already (a fifth down, as they are arranged to fit easily on the respective instruments).

I started with Boccherini's very famous minuet and Dvorak's humoresque (Passengers will please refrain ...). Both great fun to play and not actually too hard if you have the tune in your head. As I hoped, Suzuki includes fingerings to alert me to the places where it makes sense to depart from the standard (folk) fingering. Watch this space.

The editions date from 1970 and lack the piano part but I don't mind. Might go back for vol 4, but I didn't recognise any of the pieces, that may be the point where violin and cello editions go different ways, following the specific repertoire of each instrument. Note also that the editions are A4 format - they date from before the availability of photocopying, to which publishers responded by printing larger formats not so easily copied.

PS speaking of Dvorak, it just dawned on me (after this entry went live) that I have a printout of his sonatina Op 100, which I played on the flute back in 2017. Now that's a nice little project ...

Update 10.3. A video of this month's Slow Session has appeared here, where you can see me fiddling ...