home again

I am sending off all of the postcards with the holes in them that I wrote about first here and then here.

I wrote the daughter of George Kimber after the last post, finding her university email address. I told her about them and offered to send them back to her family if they wanted them.

Here is part of her response:

Your e-mail comes at a propitious time. When I got to England I discovered that my sister and her husband are actually assembling family material to write up the history of Arthur C. Kimber (my grandfather) and his son Arthur C. Kimber (my uncle who died in action during the last year of the first world war). These postcards would be a great help in producing a time-line of the family’s activities in these years. (We have no idea – yet - why the postcards have holes in them!)

Can you imagine someone emailing you out of the blue and knowing all this stuff about your family, writing about it on the web and having a box full of related postcards to all members of your family! I can't. And yet, I was presenting that to her. How could I not when I saw I could contact her?

As much as I love my vintage photo and postcard collection, I also would gladly give them all away to the rightful owners. I think most collectors would. We appreciate them so much, but also acknowledge that in the wonderfulness of these paper records is sadness that this little history is no longer with the family.

Postcards especially contain in them little everyday moments. Especially in the early part of the twentieth century when they were sent all the time and not just on vacation.

Now, the remainder of the Kimber family can see some of these moments that they have never seen before. This makes me happy and I wish I could see their reaction to opening the box and looking through the postcards the first time.

Wherever they were the last few decades, they will be back with the family soon. Off they go!