Woohoo!! Around Christmas, we heard from a descendant of Johannes and Maria (Sauer) Janson who found the porch photo online...and showed it to her mom, who knew most of the people pictured!
Her name's Geralyn, and here's how she connects:
Johannes' daughter Sophia
had a daughter, Dorothy,
whose daughter is Geralyn.
Dorothy is the littlest kid in the photo below (18).
See?
☺
This photo, too, was a mystery, but by now we recognized faces. Still, all we could do was speculate it was taken on the same day as the porch pic. Now, according to Geralyn and Dorothy, the two boys were Sophie and Nick's kids Rheinhold (Ray) and Lawrence (Larry) Daniel. They're pictured with their mom Sophie (left) and their aunt Regina.
HUGE THANKS to Geralyn and Dorothy!
Speaking of the Nick Daniel family, Sue sent a few more photos of that clan. Sue's descended from Sophie and Nick, but so is Geralyn.
(Geralyn says " Sue is my 1st cousin once removed, but with 55 first cousins on my Mom's side...." ☺ it's hard to link them all).
A side note: I like this take on ancestors and our relationship to them:
Sasha and Zamani are two aspects of time as expressed in some Eastern and Central African cultures. Sasha are spirits known by someone still alive, while Zamani are spirits not known by anyone currently alive. Sasha are concerned with, and are expressed as, the present time, the recent past, and the near future; while Zamani is the limitless past. Potential time is the third part of the space-time continuum in African Thought. People must learn from the past to act wisely in the present to create a good future.
