Christmas in Germany 1935

Christmas in Herrnsheim, Worms, Germany. I am dating this photo about 1935 as the little girl with the braids up front, showing off her Christmas gift, is my mother in law, born in 1928. Just behind her is her brother Otto, born in 1930. She is with her parents, her maternal grandmother and relatives on the maternal side of her family. Life appears to be good. In less than a decade the life they knew would be over. In 1945, at the end of WWII, two of these family members would be gone. 65% of the people in Worms would be homeless due to bombing by the Royal Air Force. The family would be cleaning bricks from the rubble of their home to build themselves a place to live. This once prosperous, well fed family, posing in front of the Christmas tree, showing off their gifts, would now be starving. Knowing what we now know of the horrors that Nazi Germany visited on the rest of the world I really don't know how much, if any, sympathy I should feel for them. 

I just don't know.

Birth of great grandmother Wilhelmine Kilian Hindel Seitel

Ancestry.com; Germany Select Births and Baptisms 1558-1898 Worms, 1883

The Herrnsheim, Rheinhessen, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany birth record of Great grandmother Wilhelmine Kilian. 1883, the  sixth birth, on the 22nd of January, the daughter of Catholic factory worker Johannes Kilian and Margaretha Kilian, maiden name Heinrich, also Catholic. They reside in Herrnsheim. The birth was reported by her father Johannes Kilian who signed this document.

Great Grandmother

Wilhelmine Kilian Hindel Seitel

Wilhelmine's first husband (our ancestor) was quite a bit older than she leaving Wilhelmine a fairly young widow at his passing. She then married Josef Seitel (shown above). He was a widower with ten children, most of them grown. That would seem to be a bit of baggage for her to take on but it would appear and it was reported that their marriage was a happy one and Wilhelmine was quite fond of her stepchildren and they of her.