Half a Million Postcards on Geneanet.org

 

Geneanet.org has a huge collection of about 500,000 postcards. I doubt that anyone under the age of 30 or so has ever sent or received a postcard but historically, they were the most common way to reach out to relatives and friends while on vacations or while away from home. Quoting from the Geneanet.org website:

In genealogy, we often associate places with our forebears: the village in the “old country” if they were immigrants, the town where they grew up which has changed over the years, the place of worship where they were married. The Geneanet Postcards collection (https://en.geneanet.org/postcards/), uploaded by genealogists over the past two decades and almost entirely composed of pre-1960 images, has postcards from over a hundred different countries.

As genealogists, any correspondence by a relative will help to establish an exact location in their lives and aid research. Unknowingly, some throw away many valuable family records because they seem inconsequential or temporary. One postcard from a relative in a foreign country could resolve the origin of an immigrant.