Baby Elisabeth Homann with her mother Dorothee Auguste from Hannover

The gentlest photographs are often those of first-time mothers with their beautiful babies. In them, you can almost feel the awe of wonder, the vulnerability, and the immense love. One such photograph in my lost photo archive shows little Elisabeth Homann at five months old, sitting safely in the embrace of her mother. The image was dedicated to someone on June 19, 1892, in Hannover, Germany.

There is not much I could find about this child or her mother. Many of Hannover’s church records are not accessible through the genealogy platforms I have access to. Still, I was able to uncover a birth record for this lovely baby:

She was Elisabeth Auguste Emilie Alma Luise Fanny Homann, born on January 11, 1892, in Hannover. Her parents were Emil Hermann August Homann and Adolfine Dorothee Auguste, née Dohrendorff.

Elisabeth’s brother, Heinz August Johannes Hermann Heiner Homann, was born on September 17, 1895, and her sister, Anna Wally Margarethe Helene Gertrud Homann, was born on April 3, 1897. At the time, the Homann family lived at Siegesstraße 5 in Hannover - a house that, remarkably, survived the bombings of World War II and still stands intact today.

Googlemaps: Siegesstrasse 5, Hannover, Germany

Elisabeth’s father Emil Hermann August Homann owned a printing and lithography business in Hannover, apparently significant enough to be included in collections of historical printing houses. At the time, Hannover had an entire scene of such enterprises.

Photo found on ebay

Emil was a self-made man. The son of a pastor, he did not inherit the business but built it up from scratch. It seems safe to assume that the Homann family was relatively well-off.

Unfortunately, I know very little about Elisabeth’s mother, Adolfine Dorothee Auguste, née Dohrendorff. Elisabeth was named after her five godmothers, and one of them shared her mother’s maiden name. I assume that the first godmother, Auguste Dohrendorff, widow of a district court official in Dannenberg, was a relative of her mother - possibly even Elisabeth’s maternal grandmother. Unfortunately, the first name of that widow’s husband is not mentioned in the record.

Dannenberg was a small provincial town of roughly 3,000 inhabitants, part of the Prussian administrative system. A Dohrendorff working at the district court there would likely have belonged to the educated middle class - respected, secure, though not part of the elite. Still, I cannot confirm whether these were indeed Elisabeth’s grandparents.

I also do not know what became of Elisabeth’s mother. What I do find curious is that in 1906, Elisabeth’s father Emil married a woman named Marie Margarethe Anna Werdenberg. He was 53 at the time, she was 29. It makes me wonder whether something had happened to Elisabeth’s mother, and whether Emil - perhaps out of necessity, perhaps also out of affection - sought a stepmother for his children, who were then 14, 11, and 9 years old. However, as I do not have access to Hannover’s death records from that period, I cannot confirm this assumption.

From this second marriage, Elisabeth’s stepbrother, Ernst Heino Alexander Homann, was born in 1907.

And that is where the trail ends. I do not know what became of the lovely baby Elisabeth - where and how long she lived, whom she may have loved or married, or whether she had children who might one day recognize her in this photograph.

Are you perhaps related to the Homanns or the Dohrendorffs?