Getting into the picture

Besides communicating quick notes or vacation greetings, postcards also served as greeting cards for all occasions. These can be gold mines for the genealogist. For example, Jill Clark of Cedar Hill, Texas, has been looking for clues in two scrapbooks full of early 20th century postcards that belonged to her grandmother and great-grandmother. "Some of these cards are Valentine greetings," Clark says, "and they really did use expressions in the '20s like 'you're the cat's pajamas!'"

Clark is now using postcards to locate descendants of her great-grandfather's sister who married and settled in Massachusetts before 1915. "From the postcards she sent my grandmother we know where she and her family went on holiday and other little details about her life at that time," she says.

Another favorite motif for postcards was transportation, which includes ship advertising, railroad stations and trains. So you might be able to find a card of the ship that brought your ancestors to America. American Line, Anchor Line, Cunard, Hamburg-Amerika, Holland-America, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Red Star, White Star and many other smaller lines issued advertising cards that featured views of their ships accompanied by some size and tonnage facts.

Family historian Gary Kleinedler of Old Bridge, NJ, has been collecting railroad cards for years. "Among the effects my father inherited at my grandfather's death were some six or eight postcards which my grandfather's mother had sent him in the 1920s, some 15 to 20 years after he emigrated from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire," he says. "My grandfather had apparently marked 'This is my hometown' on the face of one of the postcards, which showed a picture of the railroad station and explicitly named the town." On a recent trip to his grandfather's town, Kleinedler traveled to that same station.

Town and city views, another popular postcard subject, show courthouses, schools, streets and post offices. They're available for both US and European localities, and can be a way of connecting with your ancestors even if they didn't send the postcards themselves. Says Marcella Lotridge Criner of Owosso, Mich., "A researcher in Germany sent me postcards of the church where my ancestors were married. They're priceless!"

You may be amazed at how many photo cards were developed for your hometown, even showing individual streets, and you can buy them fairly cheaply. Most are from shortly after the turn of the century, following the 1900 introduction of "Real Photo Cards."

Similarly, "roadside cards" depicted diners and restaurants, gas stations, hotels and motels, and shops. Perhaps your ancestors frequented a particular eatery or stayed at a certain hotel. If you don't have a postcard within the family commemorating this, you may be able to find one elsewhere.