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Posted in the Past by Helen Baggott
As a teenager in the 1980s I was intrigued with old postcards, which I collected from antique shops and bric-a-brac stalls whenever I found them; storing them in a photograph album and now and again flicking through them to examine the pictures and curly handwriting, wondering about the identities and lives of the beguiling senders and recipients. I’m sad to say I stopped collecting them when I hit my twenties, but thankfully that’s not the case with Helen Baggott, whose personal archive of more than 100 early 19th century postcards and the hidden histories behind each is beautifully told in Posted in the Past: Revealing the True Stories Written On a Postcard.
The book was inspired by two postcards (one pictured here) bought at a car boot sale. A link to the First World War led Helen to research them and share her findings with the family of a soldier killed in the conflict. She went on to use her genealogical skills to research the recipients (and often the senders) of postcards, building their family trees and uncovering fascinating facts about their lives, sometimes connected to historic events. We have a postcard sender who later drowned on the RMS Empress of Ireland on the first night of its voyage from Quebec to Liverpool, when it collided with a Norwegian collier, leading to the loss of 1,012 lives; and a once-married mother with children by three different fathers named as ‘mistress’ on the census.
Whatever the family story, each begins with a simple handwritten message: a birthday greeting, details of travel arrangements, announcement of safe arrivals and family news. They already present a snapshot in time but here they are a fully-ajar doorway into the past lives of ordinary ancestors, thanks to the author’s extensive use of census and BMD records, newspapers, trade directories, 1939 Register and other resources, which she explains along the way. Each biography is only a page or two long; sometimes we learn of their lives from cradle to grave, others end at a certain point, but every one is unique and oddly touching.