When I saw Helen Baggott’s Posted in the Past recommended, I knew I had to give this one a shot and write a review for the blog. It took me a while to get round to it, but here we are at last!
Posted in the Past promises to “reveal the true stories written on a postcard”, and it turns out that this is mostly through tracing the people who wrote or received the postcard, and working out their genealogy. That means we get some hints about their lives, including their occupations and ages, but the author doesn’t really dig into the circumstances mentioned on the postcards, which sometimes seem pretty tantalising.
It makes sense that the focus is on just identifying who the people are, and tracing their families and potential descendants, because that’s a lot easier to research (comparatively speaking!) from census records and similar than trying to figure out what someone might’ve meant by a cryptic message on a postcard. With so little space, people don’t go in for a lot of filler, and often postcards are just a way to say hi from a distant place.
Still, genealogy isn’t really an interest of mine, so I wasn’t as hooked on this as I’d hoped to be. The idea of finding someone’s old postcard in a shop and figuring out who they were seems attractive, but when it’s done this way it gets pretty repetitive, and it’s hard to feel a sense of getting to know people from the kind of sparse details you get from census records and parish records.
That said, this probably is one that people interested in genealogy would appreciate, and I learned something about the whole process, so I did enjoy that aspect! And I especially enjoyed when Baggott found links between different postcards, showing they were sent by people who knew each other (even when found separately).
Not a winner for me, but maybe for you! On to pastures new for me—I have a couple of books lined up to read sometime soon that discuss the post or aspects of the mail, but I’m always looking for recommendations for books themed around mail, postcards and postal services. You can drop them in this forum thread to make sure I see them! (You may need to browse a bit on the forum first, to open up this section, but that shouldn’t take long.)
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