Alma Schnabel née Blencke from Marburg, Germany

I came across this labelled photograph in a German online shop of vintage photographs. The dedication on the back reads:

“Alma Blencke to dear Mrs. Hintze.

In Marburg, May 5th, 1891.”

Finding Alma in the records was easy, thanks to a public family tree on Ancestry. The family tree even includes a photograph of Alma, presumably taken in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Oh, how I love to see the strangers in my found photos through different decades in their lives! Here's a comparison for you:

Alma Anna Christiane Auguste Blencke was born on December 9, 1873. This means that Alma was almost 18 years old when she sat for the photograph, taken at the studio of Wilhelm Risse in Marburg.

Her father, Andreas Blencke, was a merchant and was 29 years old at the time of her birth. Her mother, Wilhelmine née Harms, a daughter of a merchant, was 22. The public family tree on Ancestry also shows Alma's parents - how much she took after her mother!

Looks like Alma was her parents' first-born. Alma had two brothers: Ludwig was born in 1877 (and passed away in 1947), and a baby brother Rudolf, who sadly died in infancy in 1884.

Five years after our found photography was taken, Alma married Dr. med. Hugo Philipp Schnabel in September 1896. Alma and Hugo had two children. Their daughter, Erna Wilhelmine Helene Schnabel, was born in 1897, followed by their son, Hugo Adolf Karl Schnabel, in 1899.

Sadly, Alma and Hugo’s son Karl was killed during the First World War, in June 1918. He lies at the German military cemetery in Montdidier, France, alongside more than 8,000 fellow German soldiers who fell in the battles of the First World War. The cemetery is maintained by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge). At barely 19 years old, he had not lived long enough to marry or have a family of his own.

Alma was widowed in 1946 and passed away in April 1954, at the age of 80. She was buried beside her husband at the Westfriedhof in Magdeburg.

Alma's daughter, Erna, married a medical doctor in 1925. Erna and her husband, Paul Ferdinand Heinzemann, had four children. I will try to make contact with their descendants and return this lovely photograph of young Alma to her family.