Family photos
Apr. 6th, 2025 09:23 amSo my mother just moved into the "independent living" tier of a senior-living complex, which necessitated triaging a lot of Stuff. In particular, I came home with a shoebox full of slides, since I own a slide-digitizer. Fortunately, my brother and mother had already whittled down the slides massively to only the ones that contain people (the vast majority are scenery, which was beautiful at the time but nobody's likely to care about now or ever again).
So last night I started feeding slides through the digitizer, starting with the oldest-looking ones. These were taken by my maternal grandfather during WWII, and they're clearly distinguished by being in steel frames, many of them with glass on the front or back to protect the film. My digitizer was Not Happy with the steel frames, which are noticeably thicker and more unyielding than the cardboard slide-frames I grew up with, but I got through them all, as well as a few cardboard-framed slides he took in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Lots of pictures (mostly B&W, but a few with hints of color) of my mother's elder sisters, and a few of my mother, wearing fetching dresses, aprons, and bonnets or hair-ribbons, playing mostly in a depressing-looking paved courtyard, which I assume was part of my grandfather's family's hotel in Germany. What was their life like?
See, my maternal grandparents lived in New York in the 1930's, but travelled to Germany to visit his family (so they could meet the then-two girls), and were trapped there when the war broke out. My German-born grandfather was drafted into the Army of the Third Reich despite being a naturalized US citizen; the alternative seemed to involve his wife and daughters being locked up for the duration. He had some leaves to see his family, producing two more daughters, including my mother.
When the war ended, they weren't out of the woods. He was no longer fighting in a war, but was now held at an allied P.O.W. camp named Dachau (which you may have heard of from its earlier incarnation as an extermination camp), trying to prove that he wasn't guilty of war crimes. My grandmother went to work as a secretary for the Allied occupation forces (she was born in Ontario, and English was her first language) while waiting about a year for his case to go through. Eventually he was acquitted and released, but by fighting in the German army he had lost his US citizenship. His wife and daughters got on a boat back to New York City, where various relatives took them in, while he stayed with his family and tried to get an immigration visa back to the US to join his wife and four daughters. That took another year or two, after which they had a fifth daughter.
My grandfather died of emphysema when I was five, so I don't have many memories of him -- mostly lying on the recliner, coughing and shouting at everyone. My mother never knew him without war PTSD, so her memories of him aren't all that positive either. But I have a little more sympathy for him now.
Next up: hundreds of (cardboard-framed, easier-to-scan) slides mostly of my childhood. My mother still has a box or two of print photos, and a bag of documents (e.g. her identification papers from the Allied occupation, Britische Zone, and a bunch of letters between her parents), and I'm not dealing with those any time soon. On a previous visit I brought home a bug of
hudebnik Juvenilia: her diaries from my infancy and childhood, pictures I drew, lots of stories I dictated for my mother to type, a few school term papers and book reports, stuff like that. It was entertaining re-reading some of this, but I don't know what else to do with it.
So last night I started feeding slides through the digitizer, starting with the oldest-looking ones. These were taken by my maternal grandfather during WWII, and they're clearly distinguished by being in steel frames, many of them with glass on the front or back to protect the film. My digitizer was Not Happy with the steel frames, which are noticeably thicker and more unyielding than the cardboard slide-frames I grew up with, but I got through them all, as well as a few cardboard-framed slides he took in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Lots of pictures (mostly B&W, but a few with hints of color) of my mother's elder sisters, and a few of my mother, wearing fetching dresses, aprons, and bonnets or hair-ribbons, playing mostly in a depressing-looking paved courtyard, which I assume was part of my grandfather's family's hotel in Germany. What was their life like?
See, my maternal grandparents lived in New York in the 1930's, but travelled to Germany to visit his family (so they could meet the then-two girls), and were trapped there when the war broke out. My German-born grandfather was drafted into the Army of the Third Reich despite being a naturalized US citizen; the alternative seemed to involve his wife and daughters being locked up for the duration. He had some leaves to see his family, producing two more daughters, including my mother.
When the war ended, they weren't out of the woods. He was no longer fighting in a war, but was now held at an allied P.O.W. camp named Dachau (which you may have heard of from its earlier incarnation as an extermination camp), trying to prove that he wasn't guilty of war crimes. My grandmother went to work as a secretary for the Allied occupation forces (she was born in Ontario, and English was her first language) while waiting about a year for his case to go through. Eventually he was acquitted and released, but by fighting in the German army he had lost his US citizenship. His wife and daughters got on a boat back to New York City, where various relatives took them in, while he stayed with his family and tried to get an immigration visa back to the US to join his wife and four daughters. That took another year or two, after which they had a fifth daughter.
My grandfather died of emphysema when I was five, so I don't have many memories of him -- mostly lying on the recliner, coughing and shouting at everyone. My mother never knew him without war PTSD, so her memories of him aren't all that positive either. But I have a little more sympathy for him now.
Next up: hundreds of (cardboard-framed, easier-to-scan) slides mostly of my childhood. My mother still has a box or two of print photos, and a bag of documents (e.g. her identification papers from the Allied occupation, Britische Zone, and a bunch of letters between her parents), and I'm not dealing with those any time soon. On a previous visit I brought home a bug of
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