Faces of generations past

Two years ago, I helped my father sort through all his things when he moved to a single room in a care home (I wrote a little bit about that here, as I had just restarted this blog in that period). It was a sad time and very exhausting, but I’m so glad I did it the way I did. My father lived in that care home for over two years and that little room was truly home for him during that time. All the things he really cared about were there.

When I was sorting through the drawers of his antique dresser, I came across a stack of old pictures that I had never seen before. I just put them in a box with other loose pictures, but one of those pictures got stuck in my mind. Such a beautiful woman, with that enigmatic little smile.

When I asked my father about her, it turned out she was my great grandmother Jannetje. More accurately, my grandfather from father’s side mother. She died young, when he was only twelve. I never knew that.

That picture made me realize there was so little I knew about my forefathers and even less about my foremothers. And I also realized that stack of old pictures in my fathers box would soon become a stack of “no clue who that is”, if I didn’t do something about that. So my father and I started talking about sorting through the pictures, adding names to them, digitalizing them and printing a little photobook to keep the names and the faces together before they were all forgotten. I dove into familytree websites and found a ton of information that I could add to it all (dates of birth, marriage and death, things like that). We would get that project done in no time. Or so we thought.

The sad part of this story is that both my father and I were sick quite often during the past two years. And there were so many other things to do and talk about when we were together.

One of the very last things I said to him – two days before he died – was: “You have to get better soon. We really need to start working on those pictures while I’m here.”
He smiled and said: “I’ll do my best.”
I’m pretty sure we both knew it would never happen.

After my father died, I brought all the pictures with me to the cabin and scanned them before we went back home. But I had to take a break from the past for a while. I’m not sure why, I guess I had to deal with the present first.

Right now I’m full on it again. The oldest picture we have is a very bad one of my great great grandfather, and there are no other pictures of that generation. I do have all the faces of the people of the generation after that (my great grandparents) and of course there is lots and lots of material from my grandparents and parents.

But of course, me being me, I can’t just put those pictures in an album, add their names and some dates to it and be done. I am diving into archives (luckily there is a whole lot available online these days), trying to verify names and dates and looking for scans of official documents (mostly marriage and death records, birth records are harder to find). It’s a lot of work. But I am enjoying it.

It makes me sad I didn’t get to it when my father was still alive. His sisters, and my moms sister, still are, but I have to hurry if I want to ask them questions. I also sometimes think about my grandparents and the stories that will never be told because I didn’t ask about them before they were gone. But I am grateful that there is still something left of them.

And I like to think Jannetje is smiling because she likes what I’m doing.