One afternoon several years ago when I was visiting my husband Mike’s late great-aunt and great-uncle, the conversation turned to family history and they brought out their collection of old photographs. Nestled among the pictures of people we recognized, pictures of people we didn’t recognize, and the pictures of people who neither great-aunt nor great-uncle could remember the identity of, was a picture of a stern old lady surrounded by an equally stern flock of children. Upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a photographic postcard from United States (or “Amarica”, as the postcard’s author creatively re-christened it).
We determined that the postcard’s recipients were Mike’s great-grandmother Albina Smedley and her parents, Fred Smedley and Emma Welbourn(e), and deciphered the wobbly writing which turned out to be the age-old rebuke from parents to their children: why don’t you write more?
From the names and message we deduced that the sender must have been Mike’s great-great-great-grandmother Albina Garton (Emma’s mother), although at this point we did not know if it was likely to be her in the photograph or who the four children were. The context dated the postcard between 1895 and 1910 – after the younger Albina would have been old enough to write but before she married, since there was no mention of her husband. I spent some time searching for the address on the postcard in the US Census, but eventually hit a brick wall in my research. I continued to wonder about who these mysterious people were but it would be some time before I made my next breakthrough.