Her father was Jacobus Merkelbach (1877–1942), a photographer, and her mother was Josephine Maria Wilhelmina Harmsen (1881–1969); she was the eldest daughter among their four children.

After the learning process, she joined her father's firm in 1924, and initially started work of developing the negatives, enlargements, printing, and retouching of photographs.

[2][3] Her work with her father on a regular basis resulted in large portrait photography in Vienna and Berlin-style Atelier Merkelbach, which expanded their customer base which consisted of theater artists, authors, commissioners, politicians, businessmen and rich people of Amsterdam.

He entered this photo in an exhibition in 1925 in a salon in Bandung, the city then under the Dutch East Indies.

[4] The Atelier Merkelbach continued to function during the World War II even though the fashion house Hirsch on the ground floor had ceased to function; during this period; her studio even had an anti-aircraft gun on its roof.

However, her husband Rosenboom was incarcerated on charges of espionage by the Germans, in the Landsberg am Lech prison for two years from 1941 to 1943.

She even took pictures for issuing false passports, which put her in a state of tension and fear of being caught as the German soldiers used to frequent her studios.