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Sharon Crisafulli’s latest favorite photograph is of people she never met.
Taken at a 1936 wedding in Koblenz-Winningen, Germany, the picture shows just the bride and the groom.
It was taken from below, as if the photographer was sitting in a chair.
The couple faces the lens arm in arm. The bride’s eyes are closed, but her mouth forms a wide, tooth-baring smile, and she clutches her bouquet.
The groom’s eyes are fixed on the camera. With his hands in his pockets, he appears to be in the middle of uttering a sentence. A joke, maybe? His bride looks to be laughing, after all.
Crisafulli can’t know for sure. Part of the reason she likes the picture so much is that she never will.
“It’s not a great picture,” she said. “But it’s the one I keep coming back to time and time again.”
While the details of moments captured in antique photographs remain a mystery, Crisafulli gets a thrill from finding out what she can about the people in them.
She is good at it, too. She just came across the wedding album containing this picture in November, but she already knows plenty about the couple, Harald Koethe and Anneliese Schwebel. She has even found a living relative of Schwebel’s, and she plans to return the book to the family.
Crisafulli did not come across the book by accident. She collects such treasures.
She calls them items of “genealogical interest,” and her hobby is researching the people they belonged to and, if possible, returning her finds to their descendants.
The blue, leather-bound wedding book turned up at, of all places, the Feagaville Flea Market in Frederick.
In her day job at Long & Foster Real Estate, Crisafulli is a sales manager. She inherited her extracurricular activity from her father, who enjoyed doing research into family lines and local history, she said.
“He just instilled in me this love of genealogy,” she said.
Most of her research is on local families, including the Clarke, Gardiner, Sullivan and Fealy lines. She scours websites such as www.ancestry.com and genealogy blogs similar to her own — http://trace myorigin.com. Sometimes, she researches names from random antique gravestones.
Earlier this year, her hobby gained new meaning. While researching her Clarke family ancestors (as in Clarke Place in downtown Frederick), she came across an old post on a message board from the year 2000. The writer mentioned that she had the death notice of Horace Clarke.
Crisafulli, hoping she could connect more than a decade after the post was written, responded and asked the woman to send photos of the Clarkes, if she had them.
To her amazement, the woman replied, and she had pictures — including one of Crisafulli’s great-grandparents on their wedding day. The woman turned out to be distantly related to Crisafulli by marriage. She had inherited the decades-old family album and gladly turned it over when she realized it belonged to Crisafulli’s great-great-grandmother.
“I have this incredible family treasure that I feel was just a gift out of nowhere,” she said. “I want someone else to get that satisfaction.”
So, she tracked down Anneliese Schwebel’s nephew.
A recent blog post is a plea for information about living relatives of Samuel Estill and Rosa Mills. Crisafulli has their marriage certificate, which dates back to 1872.
