I’m very grateful to a cousin who has sufficient interest in ancestry and sufficient patience with ancestry.com to have archived a trunk full of family documents into digital format. There’s a youthful picture of my great grandfather in overalls, rolled up at the knee, holding a teather to a gigantic draft horse. There’s a long wooden table of picnickers dressed in cotton up to their necks. And the new development feel to a photo of children playing on the grass between turn-of-the-century homes reminds one that what is old was once new.
And the smattering of postcards have a touch of mystery to them. First off, all one needs is a name and a town for accurate delivery. Even now the population of Lodi, WI, is only about 3,000. Back at the beginning of the last century, when this postcard arrived from Brookings SD, it was a third of that. A manageable number for the postmaster or mistress to keep track.
On the front side of the card we see workers out in the fields. Many worker were needed in the Dakotas in the summer months. Aunt Lettie wanted to know if great grandma recognized one of the crew.
Let’s take a closer look at that crew (and machinery!) It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect any of them to be recognizable. For as carefully the USPS kept track of its mail recipients, one can see that disappearing into the American West was certainly an attainable goal.
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