Family Mysteries: Revealed through holiday cards and letters

This is a guest post by genealogist James L. Tanner, a retired trial attorney from Arizona now living in Utah. He is the author of two popular genealogy blogs, Genealogy’s Star and Rejoice, and be exceeding glad. With over 30 years of genealogy experience, he currently volunteers at the Brigham Young University Family History Library in Provo, Utah.

Many countries around the world have a tradition of sending greeting cards to friends and relatives during the holiday seasons. In the United States, there is also a strong tradition of sending family letters at the end of the year reviewing important events. In the last 100 years or so, these holiday cards and letters  have also contained photos and valuable information about family members. Sometimes the information contained in a card or on a photo may be priceless and could resolve long-standing family mysteries. A card from a distant relative may identify someone whose relationship you never knew about or even suspected.

"Burns Mont. Ayr Postcard 1899" (Credit: Tony Corsini at en.wikipedia. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

Because these greeting cards are personal documents, few of this type of genealogical resources have made their way into archives and few have been digitized. There are digital images of holiday cards online, but they seldom contain any helpful inscriptions. To find these valuable records you may need to find relatives and friends of the deceased who saved the cards for sentimental reasons. Even a simple greeting card with only a signature may be helpful in establishing a time and place for a previously unknown relative, especially if the mailing envelope is found with a postage stamp and cancellation. Cards sent for a birthday may also help to establish the age of the recipient.

The tradition of sending out greeting cards dates back thousands of years to the ancient Chinese and the Egyptians who sent out cards to celebrate the new year. In Europe, handmade greeting cards date back as early as the 1400s. The first known published greeting card was created by Sir Henry Cole in 1843 in London, England. The first cards printed in the U.S. are credited to a German immigrant, Louis Prang, in Boston in 1856 (Greeting Card Association, The History of Greeting Cards, http://www.greetingcard.org/abouttheindustry/history/tabid/72/default.aspx, (accessed 26 November 2015)).

Many people save their greeting cards from year to year, but few are preserved after death. It is always important to search home sources for anything that might be related to the family, including letters, photos and cards. Scrapbooks are another good place to find letters, photo and holiday cards. After you do a thorough search of your own old boxes and drawers, you should make sure to contact immediate family members, friends of the family, close relatives, associates of your parents who may still be living, distant relatives and even old folks from the same area. All of these have the potential to have memories or even actual documents and photos. They may not be willing to part with the keepsakes, but may be willing to let you scan or photograph the items especially if you explain that you wish to preserve them for family history. If an older relative has died, it may also be possible to contact their children or other close relatives to see if any valuable genealogical material may have been kept.

Don’t forget to review old guest lists and address books if you can find them. Many people kept an address list and this can be used to find friends and associates who may still have cards or letters from your ancestors. More remote ancestors may have had their “papers” preserved by a special collections library or historical society. It is definitely worthwhile to search the catalogs of any of the major libraries in the state where your ancestors resided and also the holdings of any local or state historical societies. Finding a holiday or greeting card may be the only example of an ancestor’s handwriting and signature that you find.

Vintage Christmas Card (Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vintagehalloweencollector)

From a more personal standpoint, holiday cards and other greeting cards can make a valuable contribution to your own personal or family history. This is especially true if your family has the tradition of writing a family letter around the time of the holidays or at the end of a year. In our own family, we have a tradition of having each of our children and grandchildren write a short letter to their parents and grandparents every year. These letters are preserved in a binder year by year. It is a holiday tradition to open the new letters each year and re-read the older ones. All of these letters become valuable contributions to our family history.

Many of the memories of my own family have been preserved through greeting cards. This is a photo taken of our old “family home” in Arizona where my father was born. Because of the note on the photo sent as a Christmas card, we can accurately date the home and people in the photo. Although they may be hard to located, greeting cards of all kinds can help add important details that might otherwise have been lost.

Greeting card from James' Great-grandmother, 1943.