Grandma Schouten Family (My Mom’s Mother’s family)

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I know. The photographs of those years were very still and emotionless because the photographic plates were very sensitive. The photographer wanted a very still picture, grandmom is hanging on for dear life to the baby so it would stand still. But yes, only one smile. My aunt Marie. The eldest. You might have noticed the poor fabric the clothes were made of. Grandmom and the daughters made all the clothes including the men’s. She also ran a haberdashery shop in their front parlour and sold eggs from their chicken pen behind the house. In the rear you see an apple orchard but that belonged to the farmer behind their house. This family was as hard-working as you can get them. But the centre-piece really struck me: Uncle Jacob standing behind a beautiful table with books on it. Indicating that this was a family with book learning and that they wanted to go up on the social ladder. Granddad worked 12-hour days and had to start working again on Sundays after he had been to school to start baking the next day’s bread. It was a hard life and everybody pitched in. As soon as the girls were 12, they started working as cleaners and maids in rich people’s homes in wealthy neighbourhoods of Rotterdam. None of them had bicycles. They walked everywhere. And the house they lived in was the size of my flat. The walls were thick and the beds were built in alcoves into the walls.https://onlyjesussaves.org/?p=5397&preview=true You could close the beds for instance in the kitchen and have visitors at the kitchen table. They hand-washed their laundry outside. There was no inside bathroom or toilet and no running water. They used to bathe once a week in a tin tub which was filled with boiling water from the local hot water merchant with his horse-drawn carriage. After World War Two, not one of those trees in the background had survived. The village was filled with trees but being so close to Rotterdam, people started chopping up their precious trees for firewood early on. One advantage that family had though was free cooking gas that the farmer next door gathered with a large bubble container from the canal behind the house. Swamp gas. The entire village got free gas from him and helped pay for its maintenance. This was the same family as young adults. They did OK!
-Mom