Visions of Grandmother in the Mountains of New Mexico (near the Sanctuario de Chimayo...)
17 May 2011
A long-weekend, looking at photographs and papers of the GRAETZER family ended on the 83rd birthday of my second cousin Marianne YANCEY, geb. GRAETZER (1928-2005). The papers she thought to keep gave us a great birthday present.
On Friday night, my brother Don picked me up at the airport in Albuquerque. He had driven that day from Austin, TX, a middle leg on his journey from Chapel Hill, NC back to Point Roberts, WA. I had flown in from Philadelphia. We were teaming up to descend on our cousin Margaret and her husband Gordon in Truchas, NM, about 2 hours north.
After a wonderful breakfast meeting with a photographer and documentarian (eggs from her chickens), and a picnic lunch on the edge of the Santuario de Chimayo along a rushing stream, we arrived on Saturday afternoon at Tooley's Trees in Truchas. We had come there to look at boxes and boxes of family papers and photographs which had passed from Marianne YANCEY to her son Will, and then to his sister Margaret, moving from New Mexico to Texas and back again -- after having traveled with Marianne's parents, and then Marianne, from Breslau to New York, and then to Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, back to Ohio, and finally to New Mexico.
Before going back to help Gordon with tree customers, Margaret set us up with the first box with two photo albums, one from the 1920s, the other from the 1950s. The old one started around the time of her parent's marriage in 1927 and quickly moved on to their first child Marianne. The occasion of Marianne's christening led to a family photo without the baby Marianne, but showing the new parents Günther GRAETZER and Klare, geb. MILCH, and her parents the Breslau banker Fritz MILCH and Lisbeth, geb. FREUND. Some of the other faces were unfamiliar; presumably members of the GRAETZER family. One man, who we thought might be Günther's father Max, could not be, since Max had died two years earlier.
Then Don noticed that a man on the right side of the gathering was our grandfather Dr. Walther FREUND. It took us a few more minutes, maybe even a second look at the photograph, before we realized that the woman on his right (our left) was our grandmother Ellinor, geb. BACH.
This discovery was very exciting. We have only ever seen 3 or 4 small images of our grandmother -- very small ones, or enlarged and fuzzy versions thereof. Now, we had added a new image to the scarce gallery, and one of full length, at a happy gathering, and with her husband by her side. (My mother pointed out that it is the only photo she has seen of her parents together.)
I took a photo of the photo with my iPhone so that I could walk to the top of the tree farm where there was said to be cellphone reception so that I could e-mail a copy to my mother. I had made a photo of the entire photograph, and a second one zooming in on her parents. We told her it was coming, so she got it using her iPad. Unfortunately, since we did not have regular e-mail access, we did not see her note for a couple days. She enjoyed this new image of her parents at least as much as we did.
Later, we ran across photographs of our mother with her brother and cousins when they visited the GRAETZER's "Rittergut" in Langenau outside of Breslau. In one, she was playing in a sandbox (I did not see edging, so it might have been a sand "area"). In another, the children were playing on a huge hay pile -- photographic evidence to corroborate stories we had heard about from time to time.
We also saw lots of interesting documents - birth, marriage and death certificates, emigration documents, property records - and learned more about the GRAETZER family, filling in some missing pieces of information, and learning new things that led to new questions to answer (e.g., the relationship of three FUCHSs who married three GRAETZER siblings). It was a great weekend of fun and family and discovery in a most unexpected, and beautiful location.