Information from a third cousin in France is helping me to name the people in the photographs my great grandmother Mary Clemence Defruytier Van Houtte had kept. All of the photos would predate my great grandmother’s death in 1939, so I do have a time frame for dating them. I was only able to scan a few of the ones in the pile that my aunt had accumulated when they cleaned the house after my grandfather passed away. The scanned that I had with me at the time was a small hand held device that snapshots could be fed into. Unfortunately most of the photos had been glued in a scrapbook and the glued on paper remnants from the photo book stuck to the back of the pictures made them too thick to go through my small scanner.
I purchased a small flat bed scanner for my return trip to Pennsylvania and I will be visiting my aunt to try again.
So far from the photographs that I did get scans of I now know a couple of things.
This photo is of Germaine Defruytier. Born June 25, 1902, Germaine was the daughter of Jules Defruytier and Clémentine Josèphe Lebrun, Mary Clemence’s brother and sister-in-law. I would guess this photograph was taken sometime around 1916 to 1922. The back of the photo was signed by Germaine, to her aunt from her niece.
Another photo that I now am pretty sure of is this one of Marie Defruytier. Marie was also a daughter of Jules Defruytier and Clémentine Josèphe Lebrun, Mary Clemence’s brother and sister-in-law.
Another photo includes Odile Santens. I will need to rescan the back of the image to get a better understanding of what she had written to her aunt. I believe she is the young woman in the middle. Born January 10, 1896, Odile was the daughter of Henri Santens and Silvie Defruytier, Mary Clemence’s sister and brother-in-law.
With all of the information that I have gathered over the past year I am hoping to clear up a few more mysteries. Many of the photos have writing on the back and are signed by the sender.