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??

About twenty years ago, we were blessed to be able to take a tour to Egypt. Of course it was marvelous…….. but this post is not a travelog.

Upon my return, and being a genealogist, I got to wondering about Egyptian genealogy. I went to FamilySearch and found just what I expected: about six resources listed in the catalog and most of recent origin. Out of curiosity, in March 2024, I went again to FamilySearch to check the catalog for what’s new in Egyptian genealogy.
And by gosh! There were 87 items listed……… 87 potential sources for those with Egyptian ancestry. Two of the listings appeared to me to be in Arabic. There were 29 suggestions for history; six for genealogy and even one for Jewish history. 
Proving what? FamilySearch continues to seek out the records of the world’s peoples and make that information available to one and all. 

Our perennial other favorite, Ancestry, began in 1983 as a book publishing company. (The first edition of The Source by Arlene Eakle was published in 1983.) Ancestry went online in 1996 and has expanded exponentially ever since. Ancestry launched Ancestry DNA in 2012 and to date, over 25,000,000 DNA kits have been registered. 

Between 1997 and 2023, Ancestry added 41,000,000,000 (yes, billion!) records from 88 countries to their website; this averages out to 2,000,000 million per month. Besides adding new records, Ancestry keeps adding new features, all to help us find our ancestors.

Point of this blog post? If you’ve not checked BOTH FamilySearch and Ancestry recently, you should.  If you’re sincerely seeking answers, that is. 🙂  

Today:  The Spruce Railroad Trail is a 4-mile paved walking/biking trail along the north shore of Lake Crescent in Clallam County, just a few miles west of Port Angeles. It’s now part of the 134-mile Olympic Discovery Trail and hundreds walk this trail regularly. 

History:  Built near the end of World War I, the Spruce Production Division was organized to build a railroad line to transport spruce wood from the western Olympic Peninsula to the nearby lumber mills and ultimately to aircraft manufacturing plants in the east. The railroad was completed in 1919, a year too late for its intended purpose; it was abandoned in 1951.

Why spruce wood? And why Clallam County?

Spruce wood was the best for constructing airplanes………. and remember that World War I era planes were made of wood………..for it would not splinter, shatter or snap. And it was light and strong, perfect for the job.  

Demand for aircraft in Europe during World War I soared. The Aircraft Production Products Board of the U.S. wanted 3,000,000 board feet of lumber per month. 

(Here is a pix of 7,000,000 board feet……. it’s a wonder there are any spruce trees left!)

Sitka spruce was the ideal wood and was found mainly in WA, OR, CA and Alaska. The largest source was in Clallam County.  Harvesting of the wood began in July 1918 and provided all sorts of jobs, especially loggers and lumbermen. By the end of the war, nearly 100,000 people worked harvesting spruce wood for warplanes but the need was gone by the time the project was fully underway. The day after the armistice was signed (12 Nov 1918) the Spruce Production Division shut down and the many workers went home to find other jobs. 

The project cost $10,000,000 and did produce 88,000,000 board feet of wood which was enough to manufacture 12,000 warplanes.