A Life in Postcards

About A Life in Postcards

About the Collector: Caroline Scheving

Hello, and welcome to my digital collection of postcards! My name is Caroline Scheving, and I am a dual degree library science and art history master’s student at Indiana University, Bloomington. I am originally from Nashville, TN, and I attended college at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where I obtained my bachelor’s in art history in May 2019.

I vividly remember my mother writing postcards to send to friends and family members when we would go on family vacations when I was a child. At some point, I also took up this habit, hoping my cards would bring smiles to loved ones scattered across the country. I truly believe that sending handwritten postcards or letters is an easy way to show others that you are thinking of them. It’s also always exciting to find a letter from a friend wedged between advertisements and bills in the mailbox.

Over the years many of my friends and family members have taken note of my appreciation for snail mail and have sent me letters and postcards in return. While some of these cards have been lost or thrown away over the years, I have kept the vast majority of them. While I enjoy holding onto these keepsakes, I am glad that this Digital Libraries course has given me the opportunity to revisit my collection and share them with their original senders.

About the Postcards

The postcards digitized for this project represent a small sample of the different cards I have received and over the past several years. I have specifically limited this project to a portion of the postcards, opposed to other types of greeting cards, I have received due to the wealth of information they retain. As the postmark is stamped directly onto the card itself, instead of on an envelope, a postcard uniquely retains information concerning when it was mailed, where it was mailed from, and where it was mailed to.

While my mother always made an effort to send me postcards whenever she was on a trip without me when I was a child, I did not begin actively collecting cards until 2011. During the summer of 2011, when I was fourteen years old, my good friend Sophia traveled to Europe with her family. While in Europe, she mailed me several postcards, primarily from England and France, which I taped into a journal. At this point, I had no intention to hold on to the cards that others sent me, and it wouldn’t be until two years later that I would begin collecting cards in earnest.

Two events led to the increase in postcards I received in 2013. First, at the beginning of the year, my older sister Brenna moved to New York City, and she began regularly sending me mail as a way to stay in touch. Then, my application was accepted to spend the month of June at Tennessee’s Governor’s School for the Arts in Murfreesboro, TN studying technical theater. As is common for kids attending sleepaway camps, I received several postcards from my family members during this time.

My collection continued to grow following my time at Governor’s School, but it was not until I started college in 2015 that the number of cards I regularly received exponentially increased. They even followed me when I studied abroad at St Andrews the fall semester of my junior year of college. Most of my cards were still from my mother and sister, but I also received a fair number of cards from high school friends who were now scattered across the country. I personally tried to make an effort to regularly send cards to others as well, especially during important occasions such as birthdays.

After graduating from college, I moved back home for a couple of years to work at the Belmont University Law Library before moving to Indiana for graduate school. The number of postcards I received during this time drastically decreased for a variety of reason. For instance, I was living with my mother, so she had no real reason to send me postcards. My sister had moved to Iceland to start a family, so she likely had less time to write postcards, which would also be significantly more expensive to send. Also, Covid-19 significantly hindered travel, reducing the number of cards I would have received from friends and family members on vacation. Generally, sending mail was less of a priority during this period.

I began graduate school in 2021, and the number of cards I received, especially from my mother, increased again. I only have one card, however, from 2021 uploaded onto this website. There are a couple of reasons for the relative lack of postcards from this period. First, I received more greeting cards, as opposed to postcards, during this period. Secondly, I also was not actively collecting cards during this time, and I did not have a place to store them, and several unfortunately wound up in the recycling bin. Luckily, I now have a storage container where I can keep all new cards.

There are a couple of other things to note regarding this particular online collection. As mentioned, the cards uploaded only represent a subset of cards I have kept over time. I have tried to select a diverse range of cards, but they do not represent all the senders I have ever received cards from. While postcards are generally light in content, due to the nature of them being readable by any individual who comes across them, I still made sure to only upload cards from individuals who felt comfortable with me doing so. There are cards in my collection, however, from individuals that I do not correspond with regularly anymore, and I decided to leave these cards out of my sample. Otherwise, my selection of cards was more or less random.

I am eternally grateful for all the individuals who have sent me mail over the years. Each card truly represents a happy moment in my life. I would highly encourage whoever may be reading this to put down their phone or step away from their computer, pick up a pen, and write a letter or postcard to someone that they care about.