Postal history is fascinating because every piece of correspondence is a window into a snippet of history. But history is made up not just of events and personages, but people. Post is personal, much of it sent from one individual to another – and post from the past can offer not just a glimpse of former times, journeys and postal procedures, but a way of finding your family. ‘I’d find boxes of old postcards in antique stores,’ says AJ Bowen. ‘And I would wonder whose great-grandmother wrote it, and I wondered if my own great-grandmother’s postcards were out there somewhere.’
AJ Bowen’s interest, combined with her job as software engineer, led her to creating a tool to link postal and family history. AJ is the face behind Ephemera Search – an extraordinary digital collection of ephemera, mostly postcards and
