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Friederike Jacobsohn was born in Nienburg an der Weser in 1835. She was the first of four children of fur trader Anselm Jacobsohn and his wife Sara, née Blanck, who came from Braunschweig. She grew up with her large family in Nienburg.
Around 1859, she married the banker Jacob Valentin, 18 years her senior, who came from Hoya and lived in Sarstedt near Hanover. She moved in with him in Sarstedt and in the following year gave birth to four children: Ferdinand, Albert, Richard and Anna.
In 1872, the whole Valentin family moved to Lüneburg. Friederike"s husband Jacob became the partner of Friederike"s younger brother Moritz Jacobsohn. Together, the two brothers-in-law ran the long-established private bank "W.H. Michaels Nachfolger" at Große Bäckerstraße 25.
The Valentin family also lived in this old Lüneburg patrician house, which had a beautiful garden and a kind of pavilion in the backyard. After the death of Friederike"s parents in 1889, her younger sisters Bertha and Sophie Jacobsohn moved from Nienburg to Lüneburg and lived in the house.
In the 1880s, the younger Valentin children left Lüneburg and started families elsewhere. Only the eldest son Ferdinand remained, who later entered the banking business. Friederike"s husband Jacob Valentin died in 1903. Friederike Valentin, née Jacobsohn, lived on for a long time as a widow in Große Bäckerstraße, together with her sisters and her unmarried son Ferdinand. She died in 1921 and was buried next to her husband in the Jewish cemetery in Lüneburg.
The double gravestone of Friederike and Jacob Valentin is one of the few that still exist today, following the destruction and complete leveling of the cemetery during the Nazi era. Together with several other gravestones, the Valentin stone was built into the foundations of a makeshift home erected in 1944. When this makeshift home was demolished in 1967, this stone, among others, came to light. It was several years before the gravestones were re-erected in the early 1970s, albeit not in their original location and only as fragments.
Sources and info (in German):
Gravestone for Jacob and Friederike Valentin: epidat - Forschungsplattform jüdische Grabsteinepigraphik, Lüneburg, lbg-9
https://jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/m-o/1457-nienburg-weser-niedersachsen
Rainer Sabelleck, Jüdisches Leben in einer nordwestdeutschen Stadt: Nienburg, Göttingen 1991
