I'm sharing four photographs from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History of Black Dutch Sinti families in Hanover, Pennsylvania in 1932. These images have never been digitized by the Smithsonian and are rarely seen publicly.
Album: https://imgur.com/a/mxvBKU6
These photographs come from the Carlos de Wendler-Funaro Gypsy Research Collection (Box 6, Folder 34). De Wendler-Funaro was an ethnographer who spent decades documenting Romani and Sinti communities across the United States in the early 20th century.
In his field notes and 1932 manuscript In Search of the Last Caravan, he documented our particular Sinti tribe, recording that we called ourselves Black Dutch and that our community was small in number. He used the Pennsylvania German term "Chikkeners" in his documentation (derived from German Z*geuner).
These four photographs represent the only known visual documentation of Black Dutch families in the Smithsonian's archives. For a community with such limited historical records, these images provide rare evidence of our way of life in Depression-era Pennsylvania.
Archival Source:
Carlos de Wendler-Funaro Gypsy Research Collection
National Museum of American History, Archives Center
Collection ID: NMAH.AC.0161, Series 7.4, "Black Dutch," 1932
by ExplanationNo1569