Aunt Charlotte’s Old Face, Twice

I don’t have enough postcards to do two a week for long, but this one is brand new (to me) and I like it as a way to go into the weekend. So happy Friday, from Charlotte S., who sounds like she was a character.  She wrote this postcard in 1910, when she was 62 years old, and sent it to her 19-year-old niece. It says:

This is your Aunt Charlotte’s old face. With love to all. Your Aunt C.S. I am looking for Ma to come and visit me.

This family was easy to find because there was only one family with that last name in that city at the time, and then the family tree demonstrated the correct names and cities very quickly. Recipient Amelia grew up, stayed local, got married, and doesn’t appear to have had any kids. And she made it easy for me to find her aunt.

Aunt Charlotte lived near her family’s original homestead in the town where I went to college. She married a man who had come to the US from Germany as a child and was a good bit older than she was, and they had five kids of their own. One of those kids was a mail carrier but also moonlighted as a photographer. I have no idea if he took the picture that became this postcard, but he had a little studio in their town, so I like to think he did.

And I don’t know about you, but I think Aunt Charlotte looks good for early 60s!

But the really fun part of this one, for me, is that I was able to find another photograph of Aunt Charlotte’s old face… when it wasn’t old!

Check out this picture of Jacob and Elizabeth B., who both emigrated from Germany as children and met and lived in New York for a while,  where Charlotte (the oldest) and the next of her nine siblings were born. Eventually they moved to Minnesota and set up a farm, and their children and grandchildren appear to still be well-represented in the area.

I don’t have a source on this photograph, or a date. But that oldest child is a girl, and their oldest child was Charlotte, and if she was born in 1848, this age and this fashion work out. So I’m going to go ahead and pretend that this is Aunt Charlotte’s young face, seated on her father’s knee.

(The baby, incidentally, would have been card-recipient Amelia’s mom!)

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