Last night, when I showed Joanne yesterday's posting of a photo of Helga about age three, she wanted to have a better idea of the proximity of the park to the Ringel home, and also to the Weißensee cemetery where Hermann would later be laid to rest. 

This map of the town of Weißensee calls out the locations.

Helga lived at the Woelckpromenade address in Weißensee for the first five years of her life, before the family moved to Charlottenburg. 

Here from the scanning project is a second image of Hermann Ringel in some kind of military uniform. It must date from 1914 or 1915, when he was 27 or 28. 

It would be helpful to possibly identify the service branch from the dress uniform. For some reason, I have it in my head that it might have been the Reichsmarine, the predecessor of the Third Reich's Kriegsmarine.

There are many chapters of Helga's life that are covered in the box of photos that I am now organizing, but none is as well photographed as her leisure activities with female and male friends during her early years in New York. At the beach. A ski trip. A Connecticut resort. Even deep sea fishing. 

The photos are fun and I will be posting a selection in the coming days. For now, here are two inscribed photographs from young male admirers from her early years in New York. 

Here are two stunning formal portraits of Elly Wohlgemuth before or during her marriage to Hermann RingelHer. 

She was quite the beauty, certainly a desirable match for the already successful businessman. 

The small lake that gives Weißensee its name, and the bigger park around it, were just a short walk from the Ringel residence on Woelckpromenade. I was there myself in 2018 and can picture the place this picture was made in about 1928.

That is Helga on the right with her two friends and a doll in a pram. The friends are Ingried and another whose name I can't make out on the flip side notation. Would you say Helga is about three or four in the picture?

When the Ruby family relocated to Glen Ellyn in 1964, the three children were old enough that Helga was able to take a job working for a Chicago advertising agency in its local office, fulfilling an ambition she had to return to the work force and contribute to the family finances. 

I am still plumbing our original photo archive—which is to say boxes of unsorted photo prints—for images relevant to the project. Yesterday I went looking for photos of a 1959 Christmas on Green Valley Drive. I didn't find what I was looking for but I discovered a trove of other photo sets that I will want to post here. 

This morning I hooked up my scanner and here is the very first important addition to our Storyspace photo library. I have been posting recently about Helga's cousin Edith Krausz, who passed away at in 2007 at age 96.