I spent some time yesterday going through, organizing and scanning old photos from my mother’s side of the family, some of them as old as the 1880s. The reason I have said photos is that I plan to create an online family tree of my family, complete with a biography page with photos for each member that I can. I got the inspiration when my mother and my aunt showed me the two boxes of photos they had gotten after their mother, Jane E. née Klinkbeil Page had died.
Grandma Page had always held a certain fascination for me. Besides being a classy dame, I was named for her, after a fashion. Her original name was Jenny before the nuns changed it to Jane. I was named Jennifer solely for the nickname Jenny–but as early as age four I would have nothing to do with that nickname.
The last time I saw her was at Kip’s and my wedding, she died a little over a month after that from a brain aneurism. It was so sudden, she was, as always in great health. The day after she died I received a postcard from her which she had signed off wishing that Kip and I would “Love and Live long.” It still creeps me out.
Among the the photos, I had also been given some official documents so that I had dates and events to reference. Many are in charming stamped portfolios, like Grandma Page’s high school diploma from 1939. I was running my fingers over the raised ink when I noticed that something was tucked behind the diploma, under the elastic holders. I pulled out this photo of her mother, Maria E. Klinkbeil, laying in her coffin in the front parlor on their house in Le Roy, NY. Now, I knew Mom and Aunt Pam hadn’t even seen this or they would have most certainly have pointed it out to me (we had spent several hours poring over photos, me selecting the most striking ones as they recounted their stories as best they could).
What gave me a weird feeling as I looked at it was not the fact it was my great grandmother dead far too young from ovarian cancer, but that my grandmother must have deliberately secreted it there, perhaps even in her teens.
I don’t know much about my Great Grandma Klinkbeil. Beyond dying of cancer—my grandmother, who was nine at the time, told how she remembered her crying all the time from the pain and how her father melted the morphine in a spoon—I know she met my grandfather Klinkbeil in Germany when we was stationed there after World War I. He had actually immigrated from Germany himself as a teenager and soon after enlisted to fight in the U.S. Army. I also know they married in Germany and soon after he had to return to the U.S. for assignment, leaving her to follow several months after with their first son. I found the the immigration record for Maria and her first son Julius Max on the Ellis Island website—after I had figured out had misspelled Klinkbeil as Klinkbell (you can log in and view the information, they are the only two Klinkbells on record). Also that she had five children surviving her at the time of her death.
Beyond that, it’s mostly photos, like this one of her as a school girl in Germany. And then there is the one of her very clearly pregnant with my Grandmother—which apparently was very risqué or at the very least quite improper at the time. I imagine the one with her holding her only daughter on the outside caused less comment.
Mostly though this all just made me miss my Grandma Page. I wanted her to fill me in on the details of all the pictures I never saw when she was alive and tell me why she had hidden the photo of her mother. Also it has made me determine to sketch out the family tree by the time my mother visits in spring, so I can continue to grill her for details.
By the way, one of my favorite photos is one of grandma holding my mother in their backyard in Rochester, NY:
actual size of the photo
