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| Sylvia's paternal grandmother |
The Gibson-girl hairdo suggests the photo was taken after 1880: It's typical to fix one's hair stylishly when sitting for a photo. Where the photo was taken is not known.
I can barely reconcile this image with a known image of Ernestine, age 62, taken at Oregon State Hospital (formerly "for the Insane") in 1916. Another descendant shown the "young" photo had never seen it, could not confirm it was Ernestine Kottke although it was so labeled. What do you think? The older Ernestine seems to be toothless. Here is information about how aging alters one's nose.
There exists a third photo of Ernestine Plath posed with her husband, taken in Oregon between 1911 and 1916, showing features their son Otto inherited.
Theodor and Ernestine Plath had seven children: the first died in infancy, and Otto was born next, in 1885. Ernestine was first hospitalized for depression, sleeplessness, and "persecution" in 1905, three years after moving with her family from Prussia to North Dakota. In Oregon her diagnosis was dementia. Just another "sad Plath woman"? I don't think so. In both photos I see spirit.
That left eye in both pictures, it's not just a black eye. She seems to have some sort of eye condition, if you enlarge the younger woman photo. In the later photo, that eye looks dead. Maybe you could show these to a specialist or look up some old medical textbooks, the ones with the gory photographs taken from real patients. I was a mental health nurse working in a big Victorian asylum in North London in the 1980s. We had a lot of old patients who had been there decades with doorstop casenotes. The reasons for their original admissions were fascinating, quite often put away by families who couldn't cope with idiosyncratic or non-compliant behaviour, or even epilepsy. who were then given psychiatric labels to justify their continued in-patient status. I wonder if any old records for those asylums in N Dakota and Oregon or similar places are retained anywhere. There must be old inspectors' reports. Otto was an adult, a student, when his mother was incarcerated. He must have known something of her history. Was he afraid of doctors as a result so didn't get his diabetes treated? Did he talk to Aurelia about the circumstances of his upbringing and his early memories of his mother? Although Sylvia was 8 when he died, as an intelligent child, she may have picked up something of this in the ether which maybe led her to follow a psychiatric career of her own as a way of getting attention from her remaining parent. Ernestine died "tragically" in 1919 in the asylum. What do we know about that? It was the time of the Spanish flu epidemic. That must have ripped through those old institutions with open wards. Just thoughts from the photos and from my own experience of asylums
ReplyDeleteI have the Oregon hospital records. They do not mention an eye condition. Ernestine died of tuberculosis, which was rampant in crowded hospitals. North Dakota's hospital records are closed to the public; I would need a court order to get them released, meaning I'd need a lawyer.
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