Orange Avenue looking North, Orlando, Florida, the City Beautiful

Lockhart, Fl

April 7, 1927

We are starting north the 13^th.  The papers are all fixed all o.k.  Your letter received & glad to hear from you.  Johnsons left this morning.  Are carrying meat? and sweating.  96 in the shade.  Whew!

Van Tiryl?

Mrs. Lena Clarke

Oxford, N.Y.

This was the first "used" postcard I ever purchased.  As a longterm resident, I was so amazed at this picture from Orlando in the 1920's, and how much this corner had changed, writing on the back did not bother me.  

Years later, I got around to reading the back of the card.  At first, I wondered what kind of town was Oxford, NY?  What "papers" needed to be fixed?  And how interesting that it could reach 96 degrees in April back in the 1920's.  So, recently, when I bought a large lot of vintage Florida postcards in which about half of them were used, all with a variety of messages from the past.

I had already performed my share of researching, so I decided to investigate these messages and the people who sent and received them.  Most often, the trail goes cold quickly, due to common surnames, the availability of online records from the early 20th century, and the sometimes undecipherable cursive script that everyone from the era learned in penmanship class.  

General information is the easiest to find.  Oxford, New York is a village of about 1500 people in mid-state New York founded in 1791.  At the time I bought this postcard, the Woolworth's and McCrory's stores were occupied by Terror on Church Street and Q-Zar Laser Tag (now the entire block is the The Plaza condominium, office and theatre complex, just down the street from SAK Comedy Lab's new location.)  

The personal information is more difficult.  Many addresses on vintage postcards (especially to small towns) are general delivery, or without street numbers or names.  Property records for the recipient's addresses only go back so far online.  

But sometimes Google searches yield interesting information through archived news stories.  For instance, a search for "Lena Clarke" and "New York" brings this article from the New York Times archive:

Are the "papers" referred to in the postcard her sanitarium discharge papers after this sordid Orlando murder?  It most likely isn't the same Lena Clarke, but over the course of this blog, we'll discover some of these links to the past are just as fascinating.

Finding those links to the past will be the main purpose of this blog.  If you enjoy this as much as I do, please click one of the ads on this site, or drop a little in my tip jar via PayPal.  Please visit the links in my posts, especially if they visit historical societies or businesses.  If you know of further information on anyone mentioned in these postcards, please add a comment or contact me so we can update the post.  Spread the word around the social networking sites.  The blog's Facebook page is here.

Or you can just send me a postcard!