Nostalgia - The Reason to Collect Old Postcards

Let me start by saying that I have recently discovered the location of my great uncle's family.My grandmother had kept track of her brother until her husband's death in 1940 and then later, her mother moved in with her and some of the addresses and photos were lost since there was some anger on the great-grandmother's part on losing her husband to cancer.

My mother encouraged me to collect things to help remember details. I was encouraged to collect stamps and got my mother's stamp book collection. I was encouraged to collect postcards and my grandmother added some of hers to my collection. This is what this page is centering about. My grandmother warned me that I wasn't to snoop in her personal mail should I ever learn to read French since the postcards were written in the mother tongue. I actually listened to that advice. That is, until recently, when I was showing my twenty-five year old daughter the postcards. I was showing them to her because I think they are kind of cool

Like I wrote a minute ago, the postcards were written in French. Written to my great-grandfather. I was startled to realize that these postcards, that I have been storing for 40 years in a box, have all the addresses on them for my great-grandfather's address in Luxemburg and my great-grandmother's family in France.

I was born in 1962, the youngest of five children.

My grandmother was a feisty, brown eyed lady with a stern eye and a competitive laugh. She and I were introduced the summer I was born, since it was a birth that my mother needed help with my care, as cancer was discovered the day I was born so grandma came to help care. My oldest sister was 15 at the time and many neighbors had decided that she was my mother.Well, that's how those stories get started.

This story, however, remains on the mystery of where my great-grandmother was from and who her parents were and where my great-grandfather was from.

I went to ancestry dot com and did a search using their search tool. I discovered the manifest with my great-grandmother's signature that acknowledged her voyage on the Statandam. I had pictured the ship as one like the Mayflower. Old, wooden, creaky, but the photo that I found on Google, shows the boat to be quite modern looking Not as large as the cruise ships that people take on a regular basis now, but still a large boat.

Thanks to a history teacher in eleventh grade, we were instructed to do a family history by interviewing the grandparents that we possessed. I only had one grandmother left that was alive, so I interviewed her. This was in 1979.

It was fun because she was more than willing to share her information with me.

Hibbing is in Northern Minnesota. The family lived in Elmer, Minnesota on a farm that was given to them by the government in the land grant in the early 1920s. The land was given to them for free, the catch was that they had to clear the land before they started farming. The land was covered with virgin timber and the trees were very large and lots of them.