I found this photo in an antique store in Estonia. The handwriting reads:
Milda Sõmer
Mustvee 1940
Mustvee is a town, located on the shore of Lake Peipsi in eastern Estonia. Today its population is about 1600 of which approximately half identify as Estonian and half as Russian.
I came across a Geni page dedicated to Milda. She was the youngest of the children of Kristian August Sommer who married Anna née Toit in 1905. Baby Milda was born on October 22, 1915 in Mustvee. Five siblings had been born before Milda – Alexander (*1903 from father’s previous marriage), Elmar Johannes (*1906), Elfriede (*1907), Alfred (*1908) and Friedrich (*1911), but by the time Milda came into the world, only one sibling had survived... She grew up with her only brother Alfred in Mustvee.
I’ve mentioned this a couple of times in my previous blogposts that in the 1920s and 30s Estonians started resenting their German-sounding surnames which had been given to their serf ancestors by their German masters at the beginning of the 19th century. So in the 1930s the Estonian parliament adopted a law which allowed any individual to change their German-sounding surname into a more Estonian-sounding one. And so Milda’s surname “Sommer” - clearly a German-sounding surname – became Sõmer. The letter “õ” is a unique letter in the Estonian language.
Although the Geni page includes many details about Milda’s original family, it unfortunately shows none about her future family. How did her life turn out? Did she get married, change her surname? Did she have children?
We know that she was in Mustvee in 1940. WWII was full-on and Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union. 70% of her hometown Mustvee was destroyed by the bombings of WWII. Did Milda survive WWII, I can’t say for sure. I found an application by one Milda Žulina-Tarelkina regarding the estate of Kristjan-August Sommer in the digital archives of Estonia (unfortunately with limited access, so I cannot read the file). Could this have been our Milda, now married with a double surname Žulina-Tarelkina? I don’t find anything else on her.
I will add her photo to Geni and hopefully relatives will reach out to claim the original.
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