Category: <span>Sepia Saturday</span>

Sepia Saturday 316

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Sepia Saturday, or rather, Sepia Sunday for me, featured a prompt photo of a group of people watching a movie filming.  While we have a LOT of old super 8 reels we had digitized, I felt these two belonged here together, since they’re people taking photos of themselves and there’s a camera in the photo like the prompt photo.  On the left is my grandpa, Leon Kitko, with an old Polaroid camera, taking a selfie in a mirror.  On the right is his second wife, Romayne Greenaway, also set up in the same room with the same camera, but the focus is just a touch off.  Both photos are labelled on the back with a date of 26 May 1969, written in Romayne’s hand.  Leon is sporting quite the smirk with his hat tipped back and to the side while Romayne appears as if she’s trying to concentrate on getting everything just right before hitting the shutter release.  I love that we have both of these photos and that they’re still just a little different from each other.  I also get a kick out of the fact that they’re basically selfies, but from long before the first teenager took a selfie with a mobile phone.

Sepia Saturday 315

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Our prompt image this week featured a kitchen and oven  showing off fresh baked goods.  I really have nothing precisely like it, but I do have some more recent photos that show the aftermath of cooking, the cleaning!  Going to a rather not-sepia zone this week, we have two photos of dishwashers.  In about 1984, Bouwe Jaarsma and his wife Baukje Zijlstra came to the USA to visit Bouwe’s siblings, one of whom was my husband’s grandfather, Doede Jaarsma.  At some point during their visit, after a meal, they jumped right in and started washing dishes.  This is a scan from a pile of negatives, so the quality isn’t terrific, but it’s a wonderful, candid snapshot of their visit.  Even though they were the guests, they ended up (whether voluntary or assigned) the task of washing dishes that evening.  Even though not Sepia, it still fits in nicely with the theme and lets me connect a few genealogical dots in these recently scanned photos!

Sepia Saturday 314

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For this week’s Sepia Saturday, the prompt image was a fairly old family photo.  While mine is probably from about 1924, the family history here is a pretty neat story that I’ve been researching heavily over the past couple of months for my husband’s side of the family.  Before I get too far, let’s introduce the people in the photo.

L to R, Back Row:  Cornelius Herman Tanis, Gertrude Meyer, Jessie Meyer, Harry Meyer, Jeanette Tanis, Jenetta Meyer
L to R, Front Row: Josephine Tanis, Alida Meyer, Johannes Meyer, Jacob Meyer, John Meyer Jr., Richad Meyer, Alida Grootveld,  Helen Tanis, Gertrude Tanis.

Johannes Meyer was born 3 August 1878 in Stiens, Leeuwarderadeel, Friesland, Netherlands.  He came to the USA, arriving on 4 May 1893, with his sister Grietje, her husband Frans de Haan, a sister Willemke, and Grietje and Frans’ two children Pieter and Jan de Haan.  The rest of the family followed later and they ended up living in Passaic County, New Jersey.  On 26 November 1902, Johannes married Gertrude Lena Catherine Grootveld and had 7 children seen in the photo above with the last name Meyer.  Sadly, Gertrude died on 18 May 1916.  Just a few short months after Gertrude’s death, Alida Grootveld, sister of Gertrude, lost her husband, Herman Tanis on 15 August 1916.  Alida and Herman had been living in Wisconsin for a number of years, and in 1920, the census shows she was living as a widow in Illinois.  Shortly after the census, Johannes Meyer married his deceased wife’s sister, Alida on 10 September 1920 and brought her and her children back to New Jersey to make one big blended family.  Together they had one son, Richard Meyer, born 1 September 1922 (the baby in the photo).

I suppose circumstances lined up just right, with Alida’s husband and Johannes’ wife passing away around the same time, that  it made sense for two large families to join together and combine resources to support each other and since they already knew each other, so hey, why not?  Getting into the details of the photo, the girls are all wearing basically the same dress or variations on the same dress.  The older three boys are in suits, and John Meyer Jr. is in a lovely sailor outfit, tying us neatly into the prompt photo this week.

Sepia Saturday 313

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On time this week for Sepia Saturday!  The prompt post featured two French boys, and here I have two Dutch girls.  On the left is Ellechien Dijkema (1912-1974) and on the right is Hilje Dijkema (1914-1997), my husband’s grandmother.  It’s the oldest photo we have of her where her face is clearly visible and it’s quite a treasure!  The girls are the youngest of 8  children, only 6 of whom made it past their 18th birthday.  While the image doesn’t show it, the girls spent the majority of their early lives on the canals around Groningen, Netherlands with their father who ran a barge loaded with deliveries of peat logs for fuel, so the girls were no strangers to life on a boat.  Hilje later married and even took a transatlantic voyage  to the USA where she lived till her death.  The back of the photo has a mark for the photo studio, Foto Steenmeijer (Heerestr. 421, Groningen) and is stamped in purple ink with the date  18 July 1927, so Hilje would’ve been 13 here.  I absolutely love the details in the photo from the necklaces on the girls to their shoes, the bracelet on Ellechien, both of them with rings on, and the almost unseeable print on Hilje’s dress.  As for the photo studio location, we probably walked past it while we were in Groningen this past Fall!  There’s a bunch of great information about the photographer here (unfortunately in Dutch, but Google Translate handles it pretty well!)

Sepia Saturday 312

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The prompt image for Sepia Saturday this week featured a group of men playing, “Push Ball.”  It’s a game I’ve never heard of before, but  taken as a group of men, my image fits in!  Something about the prompt image immediately brought this one to mind, so I’m going with it.  The image is from a set taken by Earl William Powis (15 Oct 1896 – 26 Mar 1973) while he was serving in the Navy during WWI (1917-1919, stationed at Yorktown, Virginia.  It doesn’t look like Earl is in this photo, so I’m assuming he was the photographer and took a photo of a few of his friends to send home.  The back has no label or precise date, so all we know is that they’re Navy men stationed at Yorktown and a two year span which isn’t terrible in terms of identifying an unlabelled photo!

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Sepia Saturday 312 Header

Sepia Saturday 311

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My first thought on seeing the prompt image for this Sepia Saturday was WOW, I’ve got nothing.  Then I started flipping through the photos from my husband’s family and BINGO, there this one was.  The back reads, “Mom, first customer at Grand Union.”  I’m not sure which Grand Union or what year this was, but it’s probably in the 1950s in northeastern New Jersey, and the woman is my husband’s grandmother, Hilje “Hilda” (Dijkema) Jaarsma.  I can’t seem to find any newspaper articles in NJ mentioning the event, or at least not any indexed and scanned online.  Still, it’s a great photo of an interesting event, and is completely relevent to the prompt image for this week!  What a great chance to get to use this photo for a Sepia Saturday.

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Sepia Saturday 311 Header

Sepia Saturday 310

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Well, after a very busy holiday season, I’m finally catching up on a back log of posting.  This is Sepia Saturday from before the annual winter break.  Seated in the chair, examining the manual for his new Polaroid Land Camera 250, is Leon Kitko, my grandfather.  The Christmas tree is decorated with garland and tinsel, and all the unwrapped gifts sit under the tree.  Christmas was a big deal for his second wife, Romayne (Greenaway) Kitko, and there are tons and tons of photos of the Christmases they spent together over the years.  I’m fairly certain the camera that goes with the manual followed me home in the last few years after Leon and Romayne both passed, so it’s neat to have this photo to connect it to Leon.  It’s also a photo I’d absolutely expect to see – Leon with the furrowed brow, intently reading a manual, feet up, dirty socks just pulled out of his work boots on the floor.  The date on the back of the photo is 25 December 1967, and the photo is a polaroid as well.

Sepia Saturday 309

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For Sepia Saturday this week, our prompt image features a soldier  eating a donut.  I’d been itching to include the above photo for quite a while, so I decided to go with the theme of eating and include it!  The folks in the photo are clearly having a good time, and you can almost hear the laughter burst out of the image.  It’s actually a double exposure, and the back has the label, “English Lesson.”  At first I had a good laugh – if this is an English lesson, sign me up!  Then I realized that you can see a bookcase, names on a chalk board, and students hunched over their desks in the far left of the photo.  The foreground of people laughing and drinking out of glasses is definitely a second exposure.  From the names on the board, it appears that this was taken after the Jaarsma family arrived in the USA from the Netherlands, so sometime after 1951.  I have to imagine that the more jovial scene was in a dark restaurant or cafe that allowed the other image with the bookcases and chalkboard to show up in the spots the flash didn’t touch.  I don’t  recognize any faces, but the names on the chalkboard are clearly readable, at least a few of them.  The class would’ve been somewhere in Northern New Jersey near Paterson, and a quick search on Ancestry.com led me to find an Elvira Lucaire living in Ridgewood, NJ in 1960, and she may be the Ellie Lucaire on the chalkboard list.  I’m including the other names here in the case that the magic of the internet brings someone looking for their ancestor  to this photo!  Janet Lehmann, Ellie Lucaire, Marge Lesch, Marilyn Kozlowski, Liz Lee, Nancy Kime, Muriel Knapp, Dot Lynch.

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