Selma Adler née Keiler and daughters Senta, Ines and Ellen
- Photos Without Families
- 9. Okt. 2024
- 4 Min. Lesezeit
A year ago I shared a blog post with you about Eugen Keiler. While going through my vast photo archive the other day, I found another photo that I had purchased in an antique store in Estonia and that was also labelled with the same surname Keiler. The handwriting on the back of both photos is identical, including the spelling mistake 😊. Both of the photos must have been labelled by the same person. I had not made the connection until now.
I was fortunate to find a family member of the Keilers and return the first photo of Eugen Keiler to them last year, and now I can also return the second photo! But first, let me share the story of this mother and her three daughters with you.
Eugen Keiler had 3 sisters whose photos I also shared in my blogpost a year ago. I went back to the family tree of the Keilers on Geni.com and I can tell you that this lovely mother of three was Eugen Keiler’s sister Selma Adler née Keiler with her daughters Senta, Ines and Ellen Adler.
I could find another photo of the mum, Selma Adler née Keiler in the Estonian Archives. I wrote about the Keiler family background in my blogpost about Selma’s brother Eugen Keiler. Their father Carl Leopold Keiler was an editor, a typesetter and print house owner in Tallinn. Selma Keiler was born on December 30, 1882, in Tallinn, as the middle child of altogether 5 Keiler siblings. She married fellow-Estonian Heinrich Adler in July 1904 in Moscow in the Russian Empire. All their daughters were born in Moscow, too: Senta in November 1904, Ines in December 1905 and Ellen Ludmilla in June 1907. Heinrich had family in Haapsalu, a beautiful summer resort at the Baltic Sea where Selma and her girls must have spent summers and where this photo was taken around the time of WWI.
Heinrich and Senta and their three children lived in Moscow until 1920. Estonia had declared itself a Republic in 1918 after being part of the Russian Empire for 200 years. Many Estonians were scattered all over the Empire and the government of Estonia made it possible for expats to return to Estonia as citizens of the young republic. The Adlers filed for their optants’ right to Estonian citizenship in June 1920. The application mentions that the main income of the family came from Heinrich’s job at the tie factory in Moscow. But interestingly, when Selma signed the application on behalf of her husband, the comment underneath her signature reads “because husband is currently detained in prison”. In those days a mere comment that could be interpreted as patriotic towards any democratic country (like the young Estonia) or a mole's complaint about one's "capitalist lifestyle” would put you in jail in Russia (I know this from my own family history!).
Luckily, the Keilers’ application was approved and they moved to Estonia in 1920 together with tens of thousands of optants from all over Russia. But I don't know anything else about Selma and Heinrich's life in Estonia.
The oldest daughter Senta Adler, born on November 2, 1904, married Gustav Johann Baron von Knorring on February 3, 1924. Gustav was 10 years older than Senta. I believe Gustav was of Baltic German heritage and his family had been in Estonia for centuries. I found this information about Senta's husband on Wikipedia:
Baron Gustav Johann Knorring (17/29 May 1894 Tallinn - 17 December 1989 Buchholz) was an Estonian military officer (colonel, 1937). His parents were Adila landowner Baron Gustav Knorring from the older line of Kilts (1866-1952) and Konstanze von Schnell (1870-1919). In 1924 he married Senta Adler. He served in the Baltic Battalion in the War of Independence and in peacetime in the military prosecutor's office, military prosecutor 1937-1939.
I don’t know if Senta had any children or when she passed away. Her husband died in 1989 in Buchholz in Germany. So the couple must have left Estonia at some point, perhaps before or during WWII, perhaps together with other Baltic Germans in the autumn of 1939?
Selma’s second daughter Ines (also Ina or Inessa in some records) Adler, born on December 14, 1905, married Ricci Polla who according to the Geni.com family tree was a businessman from Switzerland. The couple had a son Tino Polla. I haven’t been able to find out anything else about Ines.
Selma’s youngest daughter, Ellen-Ludmilla Adler, born on June 15, 1907, married a fellow dance-instructor Victor von Sivers and they became parents to Irene Maud von Sivers in 1931. Ellen and her husband had a dance studio in Tallinn and were renowned dance instructors, their students competing at European level.
Source: Saaga
In this article she was doting on her 3-year-old Daughter Irene-Maud who apparently had inherited the dance gene from her parents. The article also includes a photo of Ellen, unfortunately in poor newspaper quality:
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything else about her or her daughter or if they survived WWII.
I found these two Keiler family photos in the same Estonian antique store a year apart! And without knowing, I had reunited them in my home. And now they will be reunited with relatives which makes me very happy!
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