Don’t most of us have old picture postcards included with our ancestors’ memorabilia? We have a lovely batch from 1911 when great-grandmother Ethel visited Yellowstone (traveling in horse-drawn carriages and wearing long dresses and huge hate). The first known printed picture postcard, with an image on one side, was created in France in 1870 at Camp Conlie by Leon Besmardeau (1829-1914). Conlie was a training camp for soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Below is an image of that card:

 I learned much about picture postcards from a webinar by Katherine Hamilton-Smith, the St. Clair County (Illinois) Gen Soc in early 2024. 

“The years 1890 to 1915 were the Golden Age of postcards; they were an absolute craze,” she explained. “Everybody collected them and would show them off to family and guests. Everybody who could afford them, bought them.” 

There were so many types of picture postcards!  Auto courts, Motels, Restaurants, Gas Stations, Churches, travel destinations, fashion, trains, cars, airplanes and ships, places, disasters (tornados, fires, shipwrecks) and commemorative events (opening of Panama Canal). Anything and everything might show up as a picture on a postcard during that Golden Age. Entrepreneurs quickly saw an opportunity to make money and would take a photo of a place and then make and sell those postcards. 
Hamilton-Smith further explained that “postcards were a visual documenting history of a place in time…… not of people but of places.” 

Today people collect specific postcards for other reasons than connections to their family history. 
Do you have any old family-sent or collected picture postcards??