Photos in a Room / On the Wall

My aunt gave me three photos to scan. She wasn’t sure who they were, but believed they were likely relatives. All of the photos were clearly taken in the same room — same door, same wallpaper, same photo on the wall. One photo showed a family, seated parents with one son and five daughters.

The second photo was of one of the daughters, wearing the same dress as in the first photo, with a man and a baby boy on her lap. Pretty easy deduction to make that this is a portrait of a new family.

The third photo appeared to show another of the daughters, a husband, and two children: a young girl and a baby, likely another girl.

I looked at the photos, closely, wondering who they could be. Clearly it’s a family photo. I guess I need to go through families in my tree and see where there are families with one son and five daughters. That combination has to be relatively unique, right?

Just before I was about to do that, inspiration struck. Wait a second… the patriarch’s face looks familiar — actually that moustache looks familiar. I had a photo of my paternal grandfather’s brothers standing before the coffin at my grandfather’s burial. Could it be the family of my great-uncle, August Hoppe?

August and Helena Hoppe had one son and six daughters — but sadly the youngest daughter died as a baby. The family configuration matched! I checked whether the other two photos matched children of any of the daughters. My assumption was that the photos were taken at the earliest time the families could have had the children, so one had to have a boy first, and the other family had to have two girls as the first children. I had assumed the tallest of the daughters was the eldest, but no! The families matched if the shorter daughter was the eldest.

There’s no reason to assume that for certain the photos were taken on the same day — sure, the daughters are wearing the same dresses, but it’s likely they didn’t have much in the way of fancy dress clothes. However, given that the photos had the same staging, taken in the same room with the same chair and other furniture, and given that the ages of the children in the three photos seem to match up so cleanly, I think it’s safe to say they were taken at the same time. The husbands have serious farmer tans, so my best guess is that the photos were taken in the summer of 1938.

The final clue was more subtle. In each of the photos, hanging on the wall, is a picture. It’s hard to make out, but it appears to be a family portrait. I scanned the photos, zoomed in, and stared at the fuzzy photo on the wall. The shape and shadows looked familiar. Are those trees? Those are trees. Holy smokes — I’ve seen this photo before!

Yes, on ancestry.ca, I had saved a photo that another user had linked of August Remus and family, including a young Helena Remus. Amazing.

PS. Wait — is that one son and six daughters? (Family history I’ve researched shows that August and Karline had a son and daughter who both died in infancy.)