Thank you for joining us today, Jane Chapman, Jennifer Jones, Kimberly C, Kyla Bayang, Lynda Heines, Marci Keats Rudolph 🙏, Marilyn Woodbury, Trish Bittroff and so many more.
We also wanted to extend a hearty thank you to our amazing speakers today, Jill Swenson, Linda Teather, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Ellen Thompson-Jennings, Jayme Blenkarn, and Paula Collins It was a wonderful session with so many stories shared by our panel of speakers. Your support, encouragement, and feedback keep us going. Drop a ❤️ below to help these programs reach a larger audience.
As Projectkin, we’re hooked on family history stories. So often, these stories start with the stuff left for us by our ancestors. In Kathy’s Corner, it helps us sort through and make sense of our collections of photographs, documents, and other artifacts. Her decades of experience as a professional photo organizer give her special insight into the field. See upcoming events here.
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Postcards and their stories has been in the background of many of our programs here at Kathy’s Corner. For this final episode for 2025, we invited a half-dozen friends, members, and a cousin to join us to share their stories. This resulted in a joyful celebration of the visual stories we discover these precious artifacts.
The discussion was so compelling you can expect more programs to touch on related topics in the weeks and months to come. Have an idea for a future episode? Drop Kathy a note:
Our Speakers & Their Postcards
Jill Swenson
Jill has written a book that is coming out next June about the place where her Swedish immigrant great-grandparents homesteaded on ceded Red Lake Reservation land in northern Minnesota in 1903. Since 1968 when Jill purchased a picture postcard of Kakaygeesick, the Ojibway spiritual leader she met as a 10-year-old visiting relatives there, Jill has collected postcards and she is here to talk about her newest acquisition: an image of her great-grandmother’s sister at her spinning wheel from 1913
Contact Details
* Jill Swenson on Substack
Linda Teather
Linda is a long time supporter of Projectkin and Kathy’s Corner, from Calgary, Alberta. She has done photo projects with her family archives. Her Postcards were found by Barbara Tien’s niece in a Thrift Shop in Portland Oregon, and we shared them on a Kathy’s Corner. Linda jumped in and did some research on the postcards
Contact Details
* Linda Teather on Substack
Mary Marshall
Dr. Mary M. Marshall, a retired educator, is the founder/curator of “Dr. Mary Marshall’s Collection.” Her interest in postcards began when she found a collection of postcards and letters in her ancestral home, and from having a sizable number of postcards returned to her after they were found in an antique store.
In addition to the slide of her postcards, Mary also wanted to share this video she recorded to express her gratitude to the person who returned her postcards:
Contact Details
* Dr. Mary M. Marshall on Substack
Ellen Thompson
Ellen has been doing genealogy since she was a teen when she interviewed her great grandmother. One of the postcards that she is sharing today is one that belonged to that great grandmother
Contact Details
* Family History Hound Notebook on Substack on the web or on YouTube
Jayme Blenkarn
Jayme is Edmonton, Alberta. Her interest in Postcards came via her unintentionally ending up with possession of many family albums.... from multiple families....100+ years of history from her complicated but amazing family tree. Paired with her interest in Genealogy, These Postcards help connect her to her roots but also help her tie together the details of her own life journal. The stories written between the lines on the backs of these cards tell here more about the people she lost than she expected. They help put a few more puzzle pieces together.
Contact Details
* JayB64 on Substack
Paula Collins
Paula is from NE Florida. Genealogy is one of her hobbies. Her postcards bring back memories of the family trips she had over her time growing up, and items that she had seen or known about through her father. The times of going to flea markets and antique shows of him looking through postcard boxes and shadow boxes for items he collected, including Depression Glass, Campbell Soup Ornaments and Royal Dolton.
Contact Details
* Paula Collins on Substack
History & Other Resources
From Mary Marshall
* The Dr. Mary Marshall Collection is accessible at Emory University: archives.libraries.emory.edu/repositories/7/resources/3057
When you go to this link or put Mary Marshall +Emory University in search bar, and you’ll see other links that show some specific photos from the collection.
From Jayme Blenkarn
* A deltiologist is a person who collects and studies picture postcards. The hobby is called deltiology, and it is one of the world’s largest collecting hobbies. Collectors are drawn to postcards for various reasons, such as interest in history, art, or specific subjects like a particular city, building, or even historical events. www.joycetice.com/johnson/catalog/rppc.html
* Stanley Johnson Exaggerated Postcards
* postcardhistory.net/2020/08/a-look-at-leather-postcards/
* glamourforgrandmothers.com/a-leather-postcard-romance/
From Paula Collins:
A person with many hobbies can be called a Multipotentialite, a term for someone with diverse interests, or a Polymath, someone skilled in many fields
* University of Maryland Libraries www.lib.umd.edu/institute-american-deltiology The Institute was established to act as library, gallery and research center for the study of postcards and North American history and culture.
From Jennifer Jones:
* Postcards remind me of how wonderful it would be to see business cards through the years. We had many different ones and in the 80s they were postcard size. I’d love to still have them.
Other Referenced Posts
Joining us in the audience today was Jane Chapman, whom many of you will know for her Substack, BJNL’s Genealogy. Her ongoing series of posts “From the Treasure Box” detailing the contents of an old suitcase her husband inherited filled with photos, postcards and other family-related items. Explore the series of posts here.
To learn more about the history of postcards and other resources, please see our Live program earlier this week:
About Kathy Stone and Kathy’s Coaching
As Projectkin, we’re here to help families tell their stories in any form. I feel strongly that our collections of photos and other artifacts are key to our memories and, in turn, our stories.
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