Photos Revealing Photos Lost

Going through some photos from my ancestor’s time in China, I find it fascinating to scrutinize the contents of those photos that – at a first glance – don’t seem very interesting.
Have you done that? Really looked at the details in a photograph and discovered something that reveals a new dimension?

I had that kind of moment with this photograph:

At first, it’s just a photo of a room at the missionary station. Nothing out of the ordinary. Ok, the daybed is spectacular 🙂
If this photo raises any question, it’s why they put it in an album.

To me it’s a photo you might take to remember what your house looked like, but it’s not one for the album.
But then I saw the people looking at me from within the photo.

They’re on the table, facing outward, towards the person holding the camera (I believe this was Olga, as she took most of the photos).

I believe the two people in this photo are the parents of my great-grandfather Nils. They were farmers in the south of Sweden, and I have never seen them on a photo before.

This photo might actually have been saved for the album for that exact reason – because there were no other photos of my great grandfather’s family…

It’s hard to make out their exact features from enlarging on screen, but it gives me an idea of what they looked like and it represents yet another historical thread that can be woven into the big patchwork that is geneaology.

Now, I hope to find more details like this, and will start working with a magnifying glass – because a very frustrating fact about old photos, is, that they are so small 😊

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EDIT: I wrote this post in 2019. At the time I was only at the beginning of my family research journey. I had not yet “gotten to know” all the missionaries to China or could recognize them by name in photographs. Today, I have lived with them, an amazing amount of news paper clipppings, photos, internet sources and books, for several years and what I could not see in 2019, I can see now, in 2024.

When I looked back through my blog posts, I therefore immediately spotted that the conclusion I made in 2019 was completely false. Looking at the blurry photo, that I back then thought was a photo of relatives of mine (probably because I so wanted it to be that way) I can today say, that this is not a photo of my great grandparents parents. This is a photo of my great grandparents missionary friends in China.

The couple in the photo is Axel and Anna Hahne. As you can see, if you compare the photo above with this one below, they are even wearing the same clothes. Mystery solved!

I will still let the original post stand, as I find it to be an interesting part of the process that one continuosly finds new leads and has to rethink previous conclusions. This is certainly a puzzle and this piece was simply not in the right place – until now 🙂 //Thérèse 2024-04-28

#Geneaology #China #Missionaries