Post cards

At our Genealogy Writing Group yesterday our discussion centered around adding images, specifically post cards, to our writing. One of our group had post cards of sites of places important to her family history.

If you want to look for post cards to buy, here are a couple of post card shows in the area to check out:
- The Grayslake Antiques Market appears monthly at the Lake County Fairgrounds and has a large post card selection.
- The Greater Chicago Post Card and Paper Show is this weekend (November 7 and 8) in Countryside, IL. If you can't make it on such short notice, they will come back on April 17 and 18, 2015 and in the fall on November 6 and 7, 2015. Click here for more details on this and other shows across the country.
- Antique stores of any kind will often have a section or a few boxes of post cards for sale. Take a minute to browse, you never know when you'll find a treasure.

If you'd rather not travel or buy post cards, here are some other sources of images you might use:
- Ancestry.com and Ancestry Library Edition have several sections with images: Pictures; Schools, Directories & Church Histories; and pictures on Public Member Trees.
- Search on eBay, post cards come up for sale all the time
- The Curt Teich Postcard Collection of the Lake County Archives has many post cards with images from around the state and the country. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the links to different regions.
- Illinois Digital Archives houses the digital collections of institutions across the state including public libraries, colleges and universities, and state government.
- see the CyndisList category on postcards
- Contact the local historical society or public library to see if they have images that you can use or download. You may have to pay for the use of them. Use Linkpendium or USGenWeb to find societies and libraries.

Have you found a good source for images to use in your family history writing? Let us know, and we'll all be the wiser!
~Sonia