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

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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
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.