This week alone, I learned that two of my friends — yes, I still have friends — became grandparents. One woman shared the good news by email, and another, I learned about her grandkids by Facebook. Quick and easy.
It certainly wasn't so easy years and years ago. You actually had to pick up the "telephone" and call everybody, one at a time — no conference calls or Zoom back then. Or you took the time to mail birth announcements — in the form of letters, cards, or even postcards.
And some of those postcards, such as the one I'm sharing with you here, could be rather clever — and complicated.
Take a look at this one, announcing (I presume) the birth of Martha McKee Mallory, who was (again, I presume) living with her parents at 14 North Pauline in Memphis, which would have been close to the present-day medical center.
I love the old illustration of the stork delivering the baby, though I'm not sure that baby looks very comfortable here — yikes, not al all. Perhaps this is why hospitals no longer deliver babies using this time-tested method? It was just too risky to trust such an important responsibility to a bird.
You have to turn the card every which way to figure out exactly what it is telling you, but it seems that little Martha came into this world at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, November 21, 1907. (It's a bit confusing because whoever mailed the card punched the "15-minute" place in both the AM and the PM areas.)
Produced by the Simplicity Company of Chicago, the "Time Arrival Post Card" offered instructions for the happy parents: "Mark a cross in the spaces opposite the day, date, and time of your arrival." And the recipient of the card was also supposed to follow those instructions by noting "the crosses in the margin."
But as you see, there are no crosses. The parents decided to used a square punch instead. I like that better.
I bet they never imagined one of these cards — mailed more than a century ago! — would end up in the vast Lauderdale Archives, and was now being viewed by millions of my devoted readers.
The card, by the way, was mailed to a Mrs. Robert Vaughn in Nashville. You'll note that it's postmarked November 22, 1907 (just one day after the birth), so the parents didn't waste any time at all telling the world — or at least their friends and family — about their new baby.
But maybe they should have waited a day or so. Don't worry — nothing happened to the baby! But something that puzzled me was the question mark after the child's name. What could that mean? So I managed to pull up the brand-new girl's birth certificate, and that shows her name was officialy Martha Eleanor Mallory, born to William and Frances Mallory. No mention of "McKee." So all I can think is, they hadn't quite decided on the girl's middle name before they (or somebody) punched and filled out and mailed these postcards.
In case you were wondering, in the city directories William was identified as a "trav" — meaning he worked as a traveling salesman.
I wonder what happened to little Martha McKay Mallory? I hope she had a long and happy life.
