A Canadian Family, a genealogy blog by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault, presents the first edition of A Festival of Postcards, a new blog festival. The topic of the first edition is wheels:

“Share 1 or more of your postcards. Choose one that touches in some way on the topic of Wheels. Anything with vehicles, bicycles etc. is fine but you can also be creative with this theme. The ideal post will contain the front and back of the postcard, its size and any other information you might have.”

I searched my postcard collection for bicycles. I did not find any, but I did find two beautiful pictures of children playing with hoops.

I wrote before about the Pardoen-Koopman family, my great-grandparents. These cards were send by my great-grandfather Pardoen to his son, my grandfather. It was send from a sanatorium, where my great-grandfather stayed because of his tuberculosis.

One card is not stamped (it was probably enclosed in a letter to my great-grandmother), the stamp of the other card is removed (and the date with it), probably by my grandfather (who collected stamps). The cards were sent to the Roemer Visscherkade in Utrecht, where the family lived until 1923. The cards were probably sent in the early 1920s, certainly before 1923.

The card on the right is simply signed Pa (Dad) and has his address (Sanatorium Sonnevanck, Harderwijk). A card with just a short greeting was cheaper to send than a card with more text.

The card on the left, which was probably enclosed in a letter, has more text. From this card (and others in my collection) it is clear my great-grandfather was not a gifted writer, but he certainly missed his family very much.

My great-grandfather moved in and out of sanatoriums during much of the 1920s. In between, he lived at home and did his job. He resigned for health reasons in the late 1920s, and died from tuberculosis on 21 July 1930.