becoming Peter

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 34:

Of Peter the future customs officer and coffee confiscator we have very few photos growing up at Lorsch. We've seen him as a little boy in this family portrait, then as a teenager here, and that leads us already to the young adult portrait photos I'm rounding up here, all undated.

So in no particular order, he had his portrait taken with a chair:

... with a sword of unknown significance (born in 1900, he may have been called up to serve at the tail end of the first world war, but I don't know of any actual war experience then):

... and finally with his girlfriend Frieda, possibly on the occasion of their engagement (although there is also a studio portrait from that time):

I'm loving the geology in this last one, but not sure where or when it was taken. As the two met in Minden, where one of Peter's colleagues was lodging with Frieda's parents, I am thinking this could be to do with the nearby Weserdurchbruch, where the river Weser cuts through the mountain range. The cool thing about this is that the river Weser really did cut through what was previously a continuous mountain range, at a time when glaciers blocked its previous route.

PS What we know about Peter growing up is that he was musical and keen to play the violin, but the struggling baker's family didn't have the funds for that. The closest he got was a cigarbox instrument lovingly crafted by his dad (but sadly lost). But he did manage to catch the attention of a certain young pianist, above, and when he later did have the funds he bought the violin I have recently rescued for their second daughter, who didn't really get on with it.

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
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter

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.