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.
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