Remembering Our Ancestors: Family Resemblances

Today, I will tell you a little something about family resemblances.

We already mentioned how our oldest daughter looks like the female line on her father’s side.  Just so you can compare, here are the three ladies in that line that have already passed on, oldest first:

Anna Elwood 1878–1944, 2nd maternal 2nd great-grandmother

Goldie Fouts, 1899–1972, great-grandmother

Naomi Ann Snyder 1921–1962, grandmother

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a direct line and should not be overly surprising, but since we didn’t have photos of either Naomi or Anna, the resemblance between them and our own daughter only occurred to us recently.

Following another family line, we were also confronted with a family resemblance that was almost eerie.  Here’s the story:

For the longest time, I had no knowledge about my father’s family.  Literally, none.  In terms of family resemblance, my mother always thought I looked like her own paternal grandma, but when I finally had contact with my father’s side of the family, I realized that not only I, but also our second daughter look just like the ladies on my father’s paternal side.  Here is a picture of one of my cousins on that side, and of her daughter as a young woman; both could (have) be(en) pictures of me.

Margarete Kappius Pohlschmidt 1890–1971, 1st cousin 2x removed

Fränzi Pohlschmidt, 1918–1983 2nd cousin 1x removed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, this was surprising only because it was new.  What really blew us away, though, was that above shown Fränzi, when she and her twin sister Margarethe were little, looked exactly like our second daughter looked when she was that age.  Truly, it was as though our own daughter looked at us out of a photo that was almost a century old.  Here you see the twins with their younger siblings Louise and Wilhelm.

Louise, Margarethe, Franziska (Fränzi) and Wilhelm Pohlschmidt between WWI and WWII. The girls are wearing the hair bow that was fashionable then, and hence is typical for pictures from that time.

That’s a wonderful beginning for a novel to write, truly inspiring, but alas!, it is “butt to chair” if you want to write stories, and therefore this endeavor will have to wait until a duller time in life.

Regardless, a printout of the picture of the four children hung on our fridge for the longest time, as proof that what runs in the blood surfaces in the next generation, and still in generations hence.

Just incidentally:  Fränzi Pohlschmidt was born on 6 March 1918, as was her sister.  Fränzi went on to marry Alois Lipke, and they had three children together, two girls and a boy.  Alois died in 1970, and Fränzi passed on 20 Jan 1983, that is this coming Sunday 36 years ago.

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