Category: Sepia Saturday

I kind of lost steam on these and miss nearly a year’s worth of Sepia Saturdays.   Things have been pretty upside down here, but I’d like to get back at these since I still have SO many photos from the family collections to share.   This week’s theme image showed a police officer escorting a group of children.   I don’t have a police officer, but I do have a woman escorting two children.   The woman is Hilje (Dijkema) Jaarsma and this was likely taken in Uithiuzen, Netherlands in about 1945 or 1946.   She only has two children with her, so the youngest child, my husband’s father, is probably out of the photo (likely in the arms of the person taking the photo).   I haven’t been able to figure out the exact street where this was taken, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in Uithuizen since that’s where the kids were born and where Hilje and her husband lived before coming to the USA.   Anyway, a short and sweet one for this week to get back into the habit!

Our final (official) Sepia Saturday is this week and a new theme picks up again for 7 January 2017.  I thought, instead of a holiday dinner party that I might share this photo of folks I think are celebrating New Year’s – there are silly paper hats, and in a few photos, kisses being planted on some of the men!  They all look to be having a good time, even if I can’t recognize anyone in the photos at all.  I assume this is late 1940s or early 1950s based on the fact that they’re from my maternal grandmother and the photos in this set all appear to be taken right around that time.  I’m not quite sure who took the photos either – it could’ve been my grandmother or possibly her cousin, but again, it’s hard to tell since whoever held the camera didn’t show up in any of the photos!  They’re still a great set of pictures and I love the big smiles and joyful atmosphere.

For this week’s Sepia Saturday, our prompt image featured two ladies building a snow-woman, so I thought for this week, it would be fun to share this photo of my husband’s father.  The back of the photo is labelled, “Henry & Girlfriend,” so a snow-woman it is!  I have to guess this was taken about 1955 in northern New Jersey, and even though the snow has melted all over the grass around our snow-woman, she’s still standing tall which means she was probably an even larger snow-woman not too long before this photo was taken!  It’s short and sweet this week, but this photo was just too good of a match to pass up!

Late to the party as usual, but here I am for Sepia Saturday as we get back on track with weekly prompts!  Our first week featured a holiday calendar  from Germany and I really had nothing quite like it in my collection since I have mostly photos, but since it was meant for a holiday greeting for the month of December so I figured a photo meant for the same effect would work just as well!  Above, we have Mary Victoria Creber, my 1st cousin 3x removed or my great grandmother’s first cousin.  Mary Victoria was born 10 October 1907 in Plymouth, Devon, England and went  to Canada with her mother and father in 1911.  She married Alan George Armstrong in 1943 and passed away on 29 October 2001 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.  I never met her, but she kept in touch with her aunt, my 2x great grandmother and sent lots of photos.  At the bottom of the photo is my great grandmother’s handwriting indicative of her later years, so she went back and labelled this later on.

The back of the photo features this little greeting, so we know Mary was 21 when the photo was taken.  She’s wearing some sort of fur lined cape in the photo and it looks rather wintery to me, so I thought it would work well enough with the theme.  Looking forward to catching up and getting back on track for next (this) week!

For the third week of the, “War and Peace,” theme, we have a photo of a friend of my mother’s family, Robert James Zupon.  He was born 20 March 1928 in PA and passed away on 2 December 2009 also in PA.  My mom remembers the name though we had a bit of a time figuring out who the face belonged to!  Once we finally got a name, the pieces fell into place.  I didn’t find out much about his military career other than a Veterans Burial Card that noted he was in the Army during the Korean War, but here we have a photo of him in his uniform with a big smile on his face.  Even though he’s not related by blood, he was enough a part of the lives of my ancestors that they saved a photo of him.