Am I Weird? (My Wife Knows The Answer.)

You'r'e not weird. I do the same thing. It's just seems like natural human curiosity to want to know who the person was and where they lived. Sometimes I'm surprised, sometimes not.

What happens to me, though, is that after seeing the person's house as it now looks (or the location of it), I then start browsing around that person's neighborhood and town just to see what it's like today. I mentioned this once to my wife because I thought it was kind of interesting. She gave me a funny look. Note to Self: Don't mention things to wife.

If you want to completely go off the deep end, I suppose you could take an old cover back to the house it was addressed to many years ago, and tell the homeowner that you must have gotten their mail by accident. Insert 'Twilight Zone' music here. No, I've never even been tempted to do that. Someone stop me if I ever am.

To truly make it "Twilight Zone"-like, dress in period costume and arrive in(on) period transportation. Not too much of an issue for a 1960's dated cover. 1860's? Well...

Not at all strange, I do it all the time, and not just with stamps or covers, I will look up places in my general reading. A few years ago I read the book "The Road to Wellville" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. It's the story of the health resort founded by cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg (the guy who invented corn flakes), and takes place mainly in Battle Creek, Michigan, a city that probably the majority of readers of the book(and viewers of the subsequent movie that starred Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Broderick)are not entirely familiar with, and since some of the book describes several streets, I decided I had to look at a good map. Another example is the old Bob Wills song "Take Me Back to Tulsa". There's a line in it that goes: "let me off at Archer and I'll walk down to Greenwood, so of course I got on Google Earth to find those two streets that are in Downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I've done that on a few occasions and I've also looked up hotels and the like pictured on old postcards. This comes as no surprise to my wife, because she knew that I was weird when she married me and I thought her equally as weird for marrying me in the first place!

Maybe we are all a little weird, or unique, as was said here more kindly.

I never thought about doing this for covers, but will now. I have looked up addresses that family lived, according to long ago censuses, as part of my genealogical research. And just looked up the town of "Empire, Nevada" after watching the movie Nomadland.

Quirky? Maybe fits us as stamp collectors but obviously from the responses here you are not alone.

BobbyT