Every summer I get together with college friends and spend several days telling stories while we scrapbook times in our lives.
This summer, I was working on 1988-1989 when my husband (then boyfriend) and I studied abroad in Aberdeen, Scotland our junior year of college. While going through all of the negatives and scrapbooking paraphernalia I came across a postcard written in German to an address in Detroit, MI. When I saw it, I thought maybe it was a postcard I picked up while in Germany on our travels thinking that it was pretty fun that it was to someone in Detroit, MI?
I thought I would investigate the addressee and figure out this person’s life. Here’s the postcard:
And here’s the writing and address on the back:
Using this address, and recognizing that this was written in 1929, I found Benno (a 32 year old single man) and his mother, Betty (a 71 year old widower) renting the house at 4918 McClellan Ave in the 1930 census.
I was curious about his life and searched out other censuses, finding him in the 1940 census and then again in the 1950 census. But now he has a wife and 3 children and lives at 17173 Centralia in Redford.
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| 17173 Centralia in 1991 |
This is when my mind was blown!
In 1991, my husband and I purchased our first house….17173 Centralia! Yes, clearly, we must have found this in the house and somehow got amongst my Scotland travel things, which I haven’t looked at in over 30 years. (I might add that since 1991 we have moved into 4 different houses, from Redford to Saratoga, Wyoming to Kalamazoo, Michigan to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania to Riverside, Pennsylvania!)
Neither my husband nor I recognized the postcard, but my husband is a very handy man and renovated the upstairs of our cute bungalow at 17173 and the only thing we can think of is that he found it in his deconstruction and we’ve held onto it since then?!
Reconnecting the Post card
In 1991, I would have never had the resources to figure out how to reconnect this post card with the owners, but with the tools today it was easy!
From the 1950 census I had 3 childrens’ names and through obituaries and other on-line tools, I found a relatively current address for one of the daughters, who is now 78 years old. She married and lived in Canton, Michigan. Although I found a street address for her, I didn’t just want to send the original postcard without knowing that she was still alive and living at that address.
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| Daughter's High School Photo |
I sent a letter through US Mail to the address on Monday, July 21st explaining who I was and how I came to have this postcard I believed was her fathers, including a photocopy of the front and back. I included my email address and phone number so that if she was interested, I could send them to her.
On Saturday, July 26th, I received the following email response:
“Thank you for sending the information about the postcard. Yes it was sent to my father many years ago. He was born in Germany and came to the U.S. as a teenager so he left many friends and family there. They kept in touch thru the years. I will try to translate the message.
I would love very much to see the pictures of your remodeling of the upstairs of the house. My sister and I slept up there for our childhood and teen years until we got married in the sixties. Thank you again. It brought back so many memories.”
So, there you go, 34 years after finding a postcard which began its journey in Bremen, Germany 96 years ago to a 31 year old man in Detroit and traveled to Redford to Wyoming back to Michigan to Pennsylvania and back to Michigan, it is now reconnected with the daughter of the recipient!
