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.