G R O W Y O U R W I N G S

I won the other of the two eBay family history items this morning.  It's a picture postcard from 1910 showing at least one of my ancestors in front of the hotel they ran in Pennsylvania.    I can't wait to see a better scan of the postcard to see who all is in the carriage.  In the past, they've been other family members.






The other item that fickleone won for me (related post here) is from another side of the family --- another hotel run by ancestors.  I've always said I wanted to run a bed and breakfast.  It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized that it ran in my blood.  I always knew I had multiple hotel-runners in my background--just never connected it with the occasional urge to run a B&B.

What's really weird is that all my genealogy work has been in hiatus for about 2-3 years.  And in the last 2 months I've been contacted by two other researchers on two of my main family lines.  One is starting a website on one of the families (related to the item fickleone bought for me) and wanted me to partner with him.  Should be fun.  The other is on the same family line--but tracing a branch of the family that I believe migrated from WV to CA in the mid-1800s, but I've never been able to fully connect the dots.  She's trying to connect the same dots.

I guess it may be time to dust off all those old genealogy files.  I've got hundreds of them.  There's a part of me that isn't sure I really want to go there again.  It can be very time consuming.

appopro to nothing ... I love Monty Python references. *nudge, nudge, wink, wink, you know what I mean? you know what I mean?*

Anyway as most flister's I'm sure have heard ad nauseum from me lately, I'm spending a lot of time on eBay. Yesterday I went so far as to organize (yes, I said organize) my saved searches so I can keep an eye out for the SPN cards I still need.

In the proccess I did a little updating on some of my original saved eBay searches back when my uber-obsession was genealogy. Just ask my daughter and watch the eye-roll again. I'm talking years of obsession, 500 years of family history and two 300-500 page family history books printed and sent to family. And I'm not even talking about my genealogy related photograph quests.

So I have some older eBay searches for two small towns on the east coast where two of my main ancestral family is from. These two small towns are 300ish years old and produced a heck of a lot of postcards for their towns considering how small they are.

Because they are small, it's not unknown for ancestral family members to show up in these postcards. I've found and acquired a few like this that are amazingly terrific.

Well I haven't looked at those eBay searches in years because I'd mined dry all the available unique cards.

But this is the weird and amazing part. After 2+ years of NOT LOOKING and only because I was updating searches because of my SPN card obsession, my older eBay searches started re-sending me email notifications today.

And guess what was the first email I received? Another, brand-new-to-me, 1910 postcard of my family's hotel in this small town, when one of the family members standing next to a horse-drawn cable-car like vehicle.

OMG, I SO WANT this!

And then also a wooden carve out model of another family-run hotel in the other small town.

See snaps below.