Page 1.
On the left is Walter Koessler, my great grandfather. This is printed on some kind of board and pasted into the book, so it can’t be easily removed and scanned. This photo appears to be taken at home, before he left for war. I like the little spots on his coat where the raindrops have hit it. I don’t know much about German uniforms, perhaps someone can help out there. Handsome, isn’t he!
The remaining photos I’ve scanned from the book. I haven’t had time to sort all the negatives to match their pages yet just because there are so many, so some of these may have better images when I find their negatives. All the photos in the album appear to be contact prints from the negatives. These are about an inch and a half by two inches in size (4x5.5cm), a common size for the album.
First, we see Walter again, carrying a tube of some sort. This is also the first photo showing his place in the army: Walter was in the reserve artillery battalion. You can see a small stack of ammunition off to the left, and a cannon in the background. Smoky back there, I wonder if they had just been firing.
The remaining images are also probably early in his training or before leaving home. A few houses, men washing in a trough, and a field. The back of one of the images marks these as taken in 1914, with some other markings that don’t mean much to me.
First post here, trying to get the format right for how to document these pages. Gotta go sort through all those negatives, too…
