Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Making a Family Portrait



This family portrait includes everyone, even the dog. This card is an outstanding example of how you could "do it yourself," by taking a photograph and then developing it on postcard stock yourself. The firsthand account of the message writer, misspellings and all, tells the story:

"Dear Nephew, Received your card Monday, was glad to here from you. Hope your papa is well again. We got home OK Sunday. Hope you did. We have 84 little chick's. Now don't get scard at these pictures, i did this work, it was my first work. Floyd was busy and I was ancious to see the pictures so i did this work. i got them to dark. I did not print many because they are not good will print more later + send you + your mama some more later we are quite busy."


There is no postmark and the card wasn't mailed, so we don't know when it is from. We get a clue from looking at the box where the stamp would go, however. We can see it's AZO paper, which was an early Kodak paper product. When all the triangles are pointing up in the corners, we know the paper was produced from 1904-1918, a good indicator of age.

7 comments:

Postcardy said...

It's too bad the card doesn't say who and where they are. They knew who they were, and they never would have believed that, 100 years in the future, the whole world would be able to view their picture and read the message.

Dorincard said...

Hey, Max! Keep sharing interesting postcards! :)

Terry said...

Howdy
Oh my simply fantastic !
Happy PFF to you .
Thank you so much for sharing this great bit of history today.
I had a wonderful time reading
your post.
Have a great rest
of the weekend.
Happy Trails

Tussy said...

Interesting post, it should sa7 who they are too!

Clytie said...

Absolutely amazing. I love seeing the original message as well as the old photo.

Happy PFF!

Sheila @ A Postcard a Day said...

He or she did well for a first work! I have one or two similar photos made into postcards that came with a collection of old cards. It makes me wonder who the family is.

Max said...

Thanks everyone for the comments. These postcards fascinate me because the person who took the photograph would have had no idea that almost 100 years from that time, a group of people would be examining it so closely. What artifacts of ours will people be looking at 100 years from now? I heard that the Library of Congress is starting to archive tweets from Twitter!!