Would Love To See Some Of The Old Postcards With People On

Hi rohumpy

Glad you're enjoying Shorpy. I have a 'view daily" list of sites. This site is #1, but Shorpy if definitely a must if you like old stuff.

There are many photos I would like to have, but at a minimum of $15 a copy, I will have to pass. I could go broke.

Rod's picture of the lady reclining on her wicker chair made me think of this lovely lady from Bowbells, North Dakota. The card is stamped with a 1c green Franklin (Scott#331) dated Oct 8, 1910 in a large CDS. From our modern vantage point the blackness of the picture makes it appear severe, however, when you look closely her wonderful facial expression softens the picture.

Hi Cynical

I can only describe it as a young lady sitting on a chair - Real Photo postcard. Since the back is not shown, I am limited but can offer a little more if the back of the card is also scanned.

Chimo

Bujutsu

What I would also add is "Young Lady Sitting In Wicker Chair" What I forgot to mention in my last posting is that the card is a 'vertical format'. I don't do this for the other cards since 85% of all postcards are horizontal anyway.

Chimo

Bujutsu

Cynical, that looks to me like a "mourning" postcard.

Usually 'mourning cards' would have black borders around the photo. I am inclined to think that this is a 'private' postcard that a family has produced.

A lot of these were produced by family members for a variety of reasons. One of the more common types of these are the military ones showing soldiers from the era of WW I.

On a more morbid side,Getting back to mourning, some postcards even showed bodies in their coffins and this included infants as well as adults.

It will be interesting to see what others have to say on this.

Chimo

Bujutsu

Rod and Bujutsu: the card was sent from Bowbells, North Dakota to a young veterinary doctor in Dickinson, North Dakota. She doesn't sound like she is in mouring because she says "don't look at the face on this - it is fierce" You know how women are sometimes.

It is a very brave man who claims to understand women


Thanks,
well that rules out a "mourning" slant.

All black seems unusual to me, perhaps she was following
a Queen Victoria fashion at the time.

The name escapes me, but there was a fossilised
timber mined off the shore of North West England
which was sculpted and worn as jewellery
with Victorian women, name something like "Jet" IIRC

It was highly polished and very ornate jet black.

Update:
yes it was "Jet" or rather "Whitby Jet"

"Victoria" is sculpted into this piece

Rod: I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment:




In some respects the dress on the post card looks like the dresses that you see on Victoria's stamps and in other pictures of her so she probably dictated fashion for decades. I know she has an architectural trend named after her but wasn't she "in mourning" for about half her life?

You mentioned Whitby Jet, a particular fossilized wood that was new to me. I googled it and Wiki has a great description of Whitby, England where it comes from. It sort of relates to one of my interests, namely, submerged forests that are found throughout the world that were flooded by changing marine water levels over the last 10000 years (referred to as the Holocene). Some of the most famous submerged forests are off the English coastline (e.g., Doggerland).

That's right Cynical,
I first came across it recently in the BBC docco..."Coast"

probably was Alice Roberts discussing geology.
I think she featured the coast north of whitby,
may have been even Scotland, where erosion is taking
sometimes up to 2-3 metres of coast away every season.

She was digging "Jet" from the cliff face.

Coast is a BBC documentary series first broadcast on BBC Two television in 2005. A second series started on 26 October 2006, a third in spring 2007 and a fourth in the summer of 2009. It covers various subjects relating to both the natural and social history of the British coastline and also more recently that of the Republic of Ireland, Norway, Faeroe Islands and France[1]. A fifth series was filmed later in 2009. The series is a collaboration between the Open University and BBC Productions, Birmingham.

The presenters, and their fields of interest, are:

Nicholas Crane (main presenter, series 1) — geography
Alice Roberts — anthropology and geology
Neil Oliver (main presenter, series 2-5) — archaeology and social history
Mark Horton — marine archaeology
Miranda Krestovnikoff — zoology

Cynical , you have the postcard,
but going by your scan......

If you stare at the woman's face, I reckon
it looks like the face has been morphed via photoshop,
it just doesn't seem to fit in place for mine.
It is too square on, and looks too young.
Something fishy going on?
I'd love a close up of her hands,
maybe a young face morphed onto the image of an
older lady.
A real curiosity.

Rod: I will definitely look up whatever I can on the "Coast" documentary that you mentioned. Might be something on youtube.

Regarding the card: its authentic. Its been in my wife's family for as long as the card has existed. The veterinary that this lady sent the card to ultimately married her sister. On the card she put a P.S. saying that she "had not rounded up a fella as yet". She must have found one because she married three years later. Ironically I have a card exchange between two of her relatives saying that she "finally got married - good for her".

Again, ironically, it was your card, I think, of the lady in the wicker chair, as well as the exchange with Bujutsu that prompted me to dig the card out of the box. The last time the card was out of the box was 15 years ago when one of the relatives died.

Will put another card on later that is more appropriate to the "people" theme as it shows family members having their picture taken in front of one of the homesteads.

Fashion:

A famous "Appleby" cover 1913

Rod: my reaction re your hat cover and the hat from the post card I put on was that such hats must be difficult to wear elegantly in a slight wind. Did you remember your cover from memory or did you search through your "file directory" nomenclature that you described for me to find it.

In regard to your post on the BBC documentary "Coast" - portions of the episodes are on Youtube. From what I saw it must have been an excellent series. While watching the short blurbs I had a flashback moment to having many years ago read two excellent travel books by HV Morton, namely In Search of England and his later one called I saw Two Englands. That, in turn, triggered a memory of Bill Bryson's book Notes On a Small Island.