Sepia Saturday - A Beautiful (Dutch) Dress

This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt is of a lady sitting sewing an American flag.

The dress and hairdo of the lady reminded me of a wedding photo in my collection. 

This photo is of my husband’s grandparents and was taken on 16 Nov 1911 in Enschede, The Netherlands.

I’ve always thought what a beautiful dress it is.

I asked my mother-in-law if her mother might have made it herself and was told that she didn’t sew much at all and wouldn’t have made a dress like this.

My mother-in-law sews beautifully so I asked her where she learned it. 

She said that she learned some at high school, and more from a sort of finishing school where the girls learned how to run a household.

Jitske JURNA (1888 – 1983) was born in Franeker, one of the eleven historical cities of Friesland, founded in the year 800.

a close up of the bodice (and hair)

Enschede, where she married, was about 200km from Franeker. 

Lochem in Gelderland, where she and her husband, Pelegrinus Johannes VAN WINSEN (1884-1967) lived out their days, was a similar distance – a long way from home.

Jitske’s widowed mother lived with the family and my mother-in-law can remember helping her grandmother up and down the stairs in their house.

They had eight children, one dying in infancy and two migrating to Australia post WWII.

Pelegrinus was a saddler, and my mother-in-law remembers helping her mother with display cases in the leather goods shop that was at the front of their house. At least two of the brothers went into the leather goods business.

Jitske lived to the remarkable age of 95 years – she would have certainly seen a huge amount of change in The Netherlands in that time.

My husband didn’t know his grandmother as she only came to Australia once when he was very little, and by the time he started his own travelling days, she had died.

Jitske with her daughter, still sporting
the same hairdo 15 years later.