From here to Heidelberg

My great grandmother Freida immigrated to the U.S. in 1903 from Germany, and married my great grandfather, Charles August Hendrich in 1904 in Louisville, Kentucky. This is the two of them, pictured that same year:

It is from this event that the old piano that has been passed down in our family originated. It was given as a gift to my great grandmother, as part of her trousseau.

My great grandfather Charles was born in Missouri to a German immigrant, Fritz Hendrich, in 1879. Here he is pictured as a child at 1½, 2 and 5 years old (the first two photos came from the photo album I had found earlier), and at about 25 years old:

Charles Hendrich worked as a civil engineer. After the birth of his children in Roanoke City, VA and the subsequent move of his family to New York, he found himself working in this office, located in Lexington, NY:

He was forced into early retirement on disability, due to the development of cataracts in both of his eyes which, as his wife Freida further explained in a letter, caused "restricted vision with night blindness." It is likely due to her husband's vision impairment that Freida became actively involved with helping the blind later in her own life.

Charles Hendrich died at the relatively young age of 58 in 1937, the same year that my own father was born. I have to assume that it is only due to his untimely death that any photos, documents or memories relating to him seem rather sparse, especially when compared to my great grandmother, whose own backstory was continuing to unfold the further I dug into my parent's garage. Here she is, pictured in 1944:

Lucky for me, my ancestors had the forethought to label things, like this box:

Note to self: label everything: photos, folders, etc. for the sake of your descendants! These items could have easily been thrown out had there not been a label on them to make me want to stop and consider what was inside. Among burial plot certificates and personal letters, I found a 4 page, handwritten note by my great grandmother in 1952 (and amended in 1954 - the year that she passed away), where she shares a brief autobiography, as well as her wishes for what should happen to her belongings upon her death.

These are her own words with translations provided in parenthesis:

"I, Frieda Wilhelmina Hendrich, geb.(given name) Goetz, was born in Mannheim on Dec. 24, 1873. My father was Heinrich Goetz, my mother Margarete geb. Hendrich. She died when I was 14 months old..."

Wait.

So if my great grandfather was a Hendrich, and my great great grandmother was a Hendrich, then that would have made Freida and Charles related somehow. I came to discover that they in fact both shared the same grandmother, making them first cousins before they had been husband and wife. According to my father, marrying your cousin back then was considered a way to keep "the money in the family."

Turning back now to Freida's note and her childhood:

"We lived in Mannheim on the second floor of an elaborate Mansion of the time, relatives occupied the other parts of the house."
It was this mansion, to be exact:

"We moved to Heidelberg when I was twelve, and Onkel (Uncle) Emil H. took grandmother and the two cousins, your father's half sisters, to live with him in his quarters in the castle, where he lived as a civil employee, he was an architect for public buildings."

This was the first real evidence I had found of my ancestors indeed having had something to do with Heidelberg castle. Remember, it was there that my brother and I were told by our father that the old clock in our family had once hung. My own memory of the clock was only of seeing it on the wall of our parent's living room growing up, as pictured here on the left hand side:

In her note, Freida goes on to mention specifically the ancestor who first relocated the clock to America:

"...the big clock was brought back by [my grandmother's] nephew, August Wolff of Munchen (Munich), as mentioned in a letter I have with the old papers. August had two children, Emil & Ida, Emil married a widow with children in his later years and had no children of his own."

It may have been due to the end of the Wolff family line here in America that the clock found its way into the Hendrich family.

Freida's note goes on to mention other smaller belongings like fine china and cutlery, and to whom she would like them handed down. The last sentence that she writes brings her thoughts about her material possessions to a lamentful close:

"...and in the end, [they are] of no use to anyone."

They may not be of much use anymore, but they are still filled with meaning.

A Foreign Language

I had no idea what was in this cabinet when I opened it recently, even though it had been sitting in my parent's garage for 30+ years. And it was in this cabinet that I began to appreciate just how old the things that had been stored away by my grandfather were. Sitting on the bottom shelf were a German to English translation book, along with these books:

I do not know how to speak or read German, but in trying to pronounce "kochbuch" in English, I deduced that this must have been a recipe book. And the book beneath it was a German bible that had the year 1758 printed inside of it.

I asked my father about these books, and he conveyed to me that my grandfather Alfred had known how to speak German. I knew that as a Hendrich, we had German ancestry, but to hear how recently the language had been spoken in our family brought home just how closely related we were to that region of the world. Back in the cabinet, as I put aside these books, I uncovered a volume with an exquisitely embossed cover and thick, gold edged pages.

It was a photo album. A very old photo album.

I attempted to find a familiar face as I flipped through the pages, but any family resemblance was lost on me. Just like trying to read German, these portraits appeared foreign. But to begin to understand who these people once were, I had to figure out who originally owned this album.

I looked back at the cookbook, carefully searching for a name to help identify it's owner. And inside the front cover, written in a delicate script were these words:

These books must have all once belonged to my great grandmother, pictured here in 1896:

Her son, my grandfather had affectionately stored these books away as keepsakes. And in order to start identifying who was in that photo album, I would first need to learn who and where my great grandparents were and came from.

From here to Hastings-on-Hudson

My grandfather H. Alfred Hendrich must have been a sentimental man. He kept everything from his children's graduation tassels to canceled checks marked as "Sentimental."

He also kept newspaper headlines announcing the end of World War II.

And kept satchels and suitcases full of documents, correspondences and photos that once belonged to his 2nd wife Jean Sharp, and his older sister Ida. He had outlived them both, and so found himself as the caretaker of their artifacts. I asked my father about his Aunt Ida. He remembers spending family vacations at her home along Lake George in New York as a child. I'm guessing this picture is a document to that memory:

My grandfather and great aunt were born in Roanoke City, Virginia. They moved at a young age to Hastings-on-Hudson in New York, where they lived out their childhood. This is the two of them, pictured in 1920:

As I continued to rummage through my parent's garage, it was also becoming clear that my grandfather's mother must have meant a great deal to him as well. Tucked inside a satchel, I came across a small clutch filled with sympathy cards from the time of my great grandmother's passing, along with her old passport. It was only within the past few months that I learned her name: Frieda Goetz.

It was becoming evident that my father had stored Alfred's things away in our garage without having opened or gone through them himself. Maybe he was too stricken with grief at the time to deal with it, or somehow felt a duty to hold onto these things simply because his father had chosen to. Whatever the reason, I quickly discovered that the Hendrichs's tendency to hang onto their ancestors's belongings has been a pattern that's been repeated now for several generations.

Where it started

I, Teresa Cristina Hendrich, was born in Glendora, CA on July 28th 1981 to Robert and Teresa Hendrich. I didn't remember much about my paternal grandfather, H. Alfred Hendrich, whose surname was passed down to me, other than he lived in the same town as we did up until his death in 1987, and that he enjoyed taking photos, like this one of me here:

Largely due to proximity, my father ended up inheriting many of his belongings, such as an upright piano and a big antique clock that we were told once hung in Heidelberg Castle. How they came into our family's possession and through whom they passed from generation to generation, was not so clear until I discovered within the first few weeks of 2018 that these were not the only items of importance that my father had inherited. It is in this corner of my family's cluttered garage, inside suitcases that had been tucked away for decades, that my paternal genealogy began to unfold.