Buffalo Zither Club – Friday’s Faces from the Past

I love old photos. They make history come alive. Names in my family tree get a face. Although, you sometimes may not know all names of the persons in a photo.

I have a photo of my ancestors who emigrated from Austria to Buffalo in 1913. The photo shows my Austrian ancestors Anton Hetzendorfer, Florian Hetzendorfer as well as Ernst August Surborg from Germany playing music together with other persons I do not know.

I would really like to know the names of the unknown members of the music group. The photo must have been taken around 1915 in Buffalo.

I tried to find persons who lived in Buffalo through online databases – without success. Then, I tried searching for „Buffalo“ and „Zither“ (the instrument played in the photo). I found a page http://www.zither.us where a story is told about Buffalo Zither Clubs. There was a photo of such a „Buffalo Zither Club“ taken in 1917 which really showed one of the persons who was also in my photo! I was excited!

And I was even more lucky, the page stated the name of that person:

„Josef Mayerhofer (..) was born in Dingolfing, Germany, in 1875.“

I think, there is also a second Zither player in that picture who is in my photo as well, but no name was given form him.

I would not have thought it possible to identify the people in my photo, but it actually worked!