I love old postcards. They seem to capture history, the way it was really lived by ordinary people, in ways textbooks cannot.
Here is a scan of the picture side of a postcard I found yesterday at a collectible store in town. It’s a scene of Chicagoans riding on horse-drawn carriages along Lake Shore Drive and enjoying a pleasant day by Lake Michigan in Lincoln Park. The postcard was sent in 1909 by “Uncle G” to his nephew, William K. Laidlaw, in Ellicottville, NY, a tiny village in the western part of that state.
When I get hold of old cards with inscriptions like these, the reporter (or amateur historian?) in me rises to to the task and I want to know more about the sender or recipient or both. This is like a compulsion to root out a long-lost tale.
So I did some Web detective work and found that Laidlaw was a longtime Ellicottville resident born in 1900. He received this postcard from his Uncle Gilbert during the latter’s trip to the Windy City, according to his daughter, Margaret Stokes, who is in her 80s now and still lives in Ellicottville (the local historian, a very nice lady, told me how to reach her).
William got the postcard when he was 9. He eventually became a lawyer and married his wife, Lorraine, a home-economics teacher, and lived in Ellicottville his whole life. William died in 1977 at age 76.
It turns out William’s grandfather, William Grant Laidlaw, was a U.S.Congressman from New York from 1887 to 1891, a native of Scotland, and a Civil War Navy veteran.
The one remaining mystery is that Uncle Gilbert wrote on the card, “Have you seen the monument yet? What do you think of it?” (See my next FB post for an image.) Neither Mrs. Stokes nor the town historian could say what that monument was, but I’m pretty sure it was the cemetery monument for William Grant Laidlaw, who had died a year before.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=7257573
It seems that Uncle Gilbert, the sender of the card, was an Episcopal priest from this congregation in upstate New York, northeast of Binghamton.
http://www.cardcow.com/322896/st-luke-episcopal-church-harpursville/
No telling why he was visiting Chicago in 1909.
It was good to chat with Mrs. Stokes about a postcard that she didn’t know existed from a time long ago. At the end of our conversation she said sweetly, “I’m glad you weren’t a salesman.”
