If you’re lucky, they left you pictures of all these places, but what if they didn’t? My favorite source for this kind of picture is the online postcard store CardCow. They sell real postcards here, but after the card is sold, they keep the scanned images and information on the site. They’ve been doing this for years, and now have a huge collection of postcard images online. You can search by keyword, or browse by category: Churches, Hotels, Amusement Parks, etc. I like to browse by location so I can browse through all the pictures of a particular place, like my hometown: Worcester, Massachusetts. There’s no way to limit a search by date, but try throwing a year in a keyword search anyway. For cards that were mailed, the year of the postmark is indexed, so you just might get lucky. For example : 1906 Syracuse New York. Just keep in mind that you’re excluding all of the postcards that lacked a postcard, and that the dates aren’t very precise because many postcards were sold over a period of several years.

Once you find postcards that are connected to your family history, you have a lot of options. You can order the actual postcard, if it hasn’t been sold already. As devoted as I am to digital images, I like keeping some of these in my paper files, and imagine my future grandchildren discovering them someday. It’s also to embed the postcard images in a blog or website as I have done in this post. You can get the code to copy-and-paste in three different sizes. The image will be linked back to the Cardcow site, and have a subtle watermark. For cards that have already been sold, you can also buy a digital image in different sizes, starting at $3 for a 600 x 377 unwatermarked image for posting on the web. Larger files (1660 x 1044) with various rights are also available.

These old postcards can supplement family photographs, and help bring your family story to life!

Another great postcard from CardCow.

Cardcow.com

I love the great collection of old postcards at Cardcow.com. It’s an online store, but they keep the card images and information online after they’re sold, and they’ve accumulated a huge collection over the years.

This 1912 Halloween postcard by Samuel L. Schmucker is one of my favorites — it’s quite racy and I like that owl thing on her head. Is that supposed to be some kind of hat or headdress, or a real bird that just happened to land there? This card is expensive, $129.95, but the image is available free to send as an ecard, download as wallpaper, or embed as a webpage.

Cardcow.com

Another great vintage postcard from Cardcow.com. I appreciate that they provide embed code in various sizes to make it easy for anyone to post these cards on blogs and websites.