Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Home Sources: Postcards
Old postcards can be a lot of fun. They may also shed some light on your family history. One of my cousins inherited a hundred of more postcards from her grandmother. These postcards relate the comings and goings of her friends but they also provide a link to where her grandmother was in a certain place and time. Through these postcards, my cousin can trace where her grandmother was living and her grandmother's life in the reflections of the friends who wrote her.
Postcards evolved over time and differed according to what time period they were printed in. Two types of postcards might hold the most interest to genealogists. Mass produced postcards, which depict places and events, that many of us are familiar with and that are still sold to tourists and real photo postcards that were available to the everyday person from between 1902-1910. Kodak's Brownie camera allowed anyone to take a picture and then to have the picture developed as a print or a postcard. While the mass-produced type of postcard will help your family get a sense for your ancestral city in earlier times, the real photo postcard might provide an image of family members or the family home.