Old Postcard Albums

Twenty years ago or so, I had a brief obsession with attending a local auction. It's confounding how many odds and ends you can convince yourself you must have when you go to an auction. The only solution is not to go at all, as I soon found out.

We recently found a couple of remnants of that period down in the basement: two early-20th-century albums full of postcards. The pages, bound into hard covers, are crumbling black construction paper with the cards attached at the corners. The cards come from all over the U.S. and the world and were sent to several members of a family in Brooklyn, New York between about 1905 and 1912.


One of the albums is vertical, with this art noveau botanical motif.


The flowers are recognizable as cyclamens.

The other cover is much plainer, with just these gold-stamped words:


Very nice post-Victorian letters, by the way.

The backs of the cards often feature the words "post card," as if the nature of this particular piece of paper might be in question. Maybe postcards were new at that time, as travel and tourism were just becoming a common thing? I don't know.


This card has particularly nice letters.

Most of the personal messages written on the cards — when I can read the handwriting— are pretty boring, communicating arrival or asking after health. There is one July 1910 postcard that contains an short but intriguing note, though.

On its front is a sepia-toned photo of the quadrangle at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (which is not too far from the ancestral home of Daughter Number Three, by the way). On the reverse side, the card was addressed to Miss Agnes Dwyer, one of the family members, who lived in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood about a block and a half from Prospect Park. This is the complete message:

Dear Agnes,

Why don't you come up for the rest of the summer? Quite a few girls here for a good time.

Alice

I feel as though that short message could be the inspiration for a short story or maybe even a novel. Who were these women (or girls) in 1910, how do they know each other, what circumstances could make it possible for Agnes to suddenly "come up for the rest of the summer" on short notice? Were they women or actual girls? What does Alice mean by the words good time?

It occurs to me that the full 1910 Census records are public, and I can find out some details about who the Dwyers were, since I have their address. Hmm.