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06 May 2015

Greeting Cards as Clues

When my parents were married in 1967, they received a congratulatory card from Ola Howes. The name did not ring a bell to me and I concluded it was a former neighbor or a fellow teacher of my mother.

Upon asking Mom who Ola Howes was, I was told that "I don't know."

Years later in my research, I discovered that my paternal great-grandfather had a first cousin Ola (Baker) Howes (their mothers were half-sisters). She had apparently seen my parents' announcement in the paper and sent a card.

Are there genealogical clues hiding in old greeting cards?

5 comments:

  1. My grandmother kept post cards sent to her, and as pictorial memories of places she visited. My cousin has her collection, and in it I found several new clues to family in them. Plus, I learned she had traveled far more than I had known prior to reading her postcards!

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  2. I did an entire series of blog posts using the names of people who signed the guest books at my grandparents' funerals. I discovered family connections, second marriages, and more. Even noticing when one person signed for another offers a clue to a close connection.

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    1. I also used the guest books, but the real treasure were the names on the cards from the floral arrangements. I was able to sort out my grandmother's extended McBride family with those and using census records gave me their family information.

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  3. I’ve tried to save the cards & letters I’ve received over the years, & recently found a bundle of cards from relatives when I’d gotten married back in 1976. There were 10 from relatives of my husband’s, & I only knew his Grandma; & hadn’t even seen photos of the rest of them. Recently I’d been organizing photos my mother-in-law had left me, & there was everybody who had sent the cards. Now I had faces to go along with the names! It’d been over 35 years since I got those cards, & almost all of those relatives have passed.

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  4. My great aunts saved wedding invitations. When we closed their home, I bundled all the invitations together thinking I would one day get them back to a family member. One was even printed at Tiffany's. When I started doing genealogy years later, they became a fantastic source for dates and maiden names. Almost every scrap of paper can have value!

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