This photo came to me fully identified with a location, names and even birth dates. It reads:
Lina Nerong (born in 1879)
née Eehlers,
with Ocke Nerong,
born August 12, 1913
The location stamp reads Bergedorf. Bergedorf used to be an independent community and since 1938, a quarter of the great borough of Hamburg, my home city.
Ocke Nerong is an unusual name, I hoped it would narrow down my search. And indeed, there were not many matches. One Ocke Nerong had made a name for himself as “the Chronist of Island Föhr”. According to Wikipedia, he was a teacher and a local researcher who published many articles and documents about the area of Flensburg, especially about the island of Föhr in the North Sea. But he passed away in 1909, so he obviously wasn’t the little Ocke in our photo. What are the odds, I thought to myself. Was he perhaps little Ocke’s grandpa?
I can confirm that he was! Grandpa Ocke Nerong and his wife Friederike née Lorenzen had 5 children and the middle one, Friedrich Christian Nerong, was baby Ocke’s daddy. He married Ocke’s mama Karoline “Lina” Emma Margareta Ehlers on February 5, 1910 in Altona near Hamburg. Their marriage record also confirms that Lina was born in 1879 (on April 13), just like written on the back of the photo; and Friedrich on March 5, 1884. Friedrich was a teacher in Bergedorf.
Looks like Ocke might have become a concert pianist and piano teacher. At least I think it’s our Ocke in the city directories of Hamburg between 1950 and 1970 listed as one.
Ocke’s father died of a stroke in May 1939. I find mother Lina living at 6 Am Brink in Bergedorf as a widow in 1940, the same address Ocke was later registered at:
Source: GoogleMaps
Mother Lina passed away in May 1953. She might have had another son, Hans-Heinrich, who was born in November 1920 in Bergedorf and who was killed in action in Horodok in today’s Ukraine on his 22nd birthday in 1942. How tragic!
I don’t know much else about Ocke's life or family. I couldn't locate his birth record, but if he was born in 1913, he could have lived way past the 1970s. I will add Ocke and Lina to the FindaGrave page of Ocke's father Friedrich. Perhaps someone out there is related to the Nerongs and would love to safekeep the original?
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