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!

Last week I celebrated my birthday in Italy with my daughters. We spent a few days in the Puglia region, where both of my father’s parents came from, and on Tuesday we took the train from Bari and spent an afternoon in this town, the birthplace of my grandfather, Luigi Giuseppe Balestracci (1892-1972).

We didn’t do any of the things you might expect me to do — track down relatives, go to the cemetery and find the graves of my great grandparents, or even just to make a decent tour and photographic survey of the town. I didn’t want to do any of that, not this trip, anyway. My only goal was to be there, to know what it was like to get off the train and know that I was actually there in Acquaviva delle Fonti, Fountain of the Living Water, a magical place name that’s lived in my imagination for as long as I can remember.

It was a gray and overcast day, threatening rain when we got off the train. I had the irrational notion that we’d step off the train and find ourselves in 1911, the year my grandfather left for America, and that gaily dressed Italian peasants would be dancing around the fountain singing folksongs. Or that my unknown relatives, the descendants of my grandfather’s brother Domenico, would just happen to be strolling by the train station and would see me and instantly recognize me as one of them. But none of that happened…we just got off the train and aimlessly wandered around town for a while. It felt good to be there, and to see the ordinariness of the town. I wondered what my grandfather would think of me bringing his adult great granddaughers, born after he died, to his hometown. It was nice, but I still wanted a little more.

Heading back to the train station, we passed a restaurant and decided to stop for a late lunch. We walked in and the first thing I saw was a dark wooden cabinet with glass doors, holding wine glasses. It looked a lot like the one in my grandparents’ dining room, seen in the background of the photo on the right. And on the wall was a landscape framed in a distinctive thick oval wooden frame, just like the frame that held photographs of my great-grandparents in my grandparents’ house. I know these aren’t really amazing coincidences, but these familiar objects made me feel more connected.

The waitress was friendly and patient with our limited Italian, and the food and wine were great. We had a good time sitting there, enjoying the food and conversation, and I decided that although I miss my parents and grandparents and honor their memory, it’s better to live in the present and appreciate spending time with the living members of my family!

A few months ago, I went on the Ellis Island website and found the record of my grandfather’s arrival. Our family name was transcribed incorrectly, but the search engines “sounds like” option brought up the right record. It was quite thrilling to see my grandfather’s name and information in the ship manifest, to know the date of his arrival, and to know the name of the ship, the Duca degli Abruzzi, and to see a picture of the ship. I loved the picture so much, I ordered copies for my daughters and sister and nieces for Christmas. There were two different versions of picture, so I ordered both. I hope they will all keep their copies, and that children in future generations of the family will come across these, and look at the picture, and want to know a little more about their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, where we all came from and their family’s story.

My grandmother came from the same region of Italy as my grandfather, but she didn’t come through Ellis Island. She took a ship from Naples to Boston. I was able to find her records as well, and learn the name of her ship, the Canopic. Here’s a postcard from Cardcow.com showing that ship:

Cardcow.com

My aunt has Alzheimer’s Disease. Both my parents died young, and when I see my aunt fade away, I know I’m losing one of my few remaining connections to my parents and their generation.

During one visit with my aunt in the nursing home, I reminisced about what a great dancer she had been. “Do you remember?” I asked her. “You could do all the dances. You taught for Arthur Murray.” I was just talking, I didn’t think she was actually listening. But when she heard the name Arthur Murray, she jumped up and launched into a lively rendition of the song Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry. She knew all the words and did the whole dance routine, with lots of turns and kicks.

I had never heard the song before, so I went home and did a little research online. I learned that it was a novelty song by Johnny Mercer and Victor Schertzinger, sung by Betty Hutton in the 1942 movie The Fleet’s In, and I found this video clip from the movie on YouTube. Betty Hutton is brash and bold, quite magnificent in her own way, wearing one of the ugliest outfits ever seen in a musical. This movie clip was new to me, but was clearly stored intact within my aunt’s mind, where so much else was lost. Watching this online made me feel just a little closer to her.

Related Links

• Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry — Lyrics and chords from the GuitarGuy’s website
• Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry — An interesting post providing some context from the Big Apple website
• Murray in a Hurry — Brief article from Time Magazine, October, 1942, on the growing popularity of Arthur Murray studios:
  

  “Arthur Murray, the Tiffany and Sears, Roebuck of U.S. dance, has almost every kind of pupil in his nationwide chain of 146 dance schools. But the trade of socialites is fast being augmented by the trade of new-rich war workers, who have long listened to the juke-box hit ‘Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry.’”

• RIP Betty Hutton “the Blonde Bombshell — From the Classic Film Comedy website

Polaroid announced last month that they would no longer produce instant film was just an inevitable step in the long, slow decline of Polaroid and the world of instant photography. Instant film photography, killed off by digital photography. In the world of cameraphones, Flickr, photoprinters, who needs instant film cameras?

But Polaroid really was once so cool. In Feeney’ words:

“…there are those who remember when it was the Apple of its day: feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering. The Polaroid Land Camera was like the Mac, with all other consumer cameras PCs. There was the same sense of engineering superiority and cultural cachet.”

When I was a child, my engineer father had a serious camera with a light meter and a lot of accessories. He took slides and wrote the technical data on the frames, and he carefully ordered and organized the slides in trays for the projector. My mother had an old Brownie box camera, later replaced by an Instamatic, totally point-and-shoot. She had some of her older photographs in albums and baby books, but most of her pictures were just tossed into shoeboxes, undated and unlabeled.

But back in the fifties, my uncle worked for Polaroid, and we cousins were fascinated watching him pull out the pictures, peel off the backing, and rub them with that fixative stick. He made quite a show of it. Those tiny little black-and-white photographs with deckled edges were, like my aunt and uncle themselves, just so modern, so cool, so Cambridge. I have a few of those pictures, because they weren’t the sort of pictures you put in albums, they were little treats that you gave away. “Here, kid, this one’s yours,” as if it were a balloon animal or party favor.

I didn’t think about any of this much until digital photography came along, and I discovered that same sense of excitement I used to have watching Uncle Steve do his magic producing instant pictures. It still feels like magic to me to be able to capture moments, see them right away and share them.