Very social media

When they were little, our kids had a well-loved book called Post für den Tiger ("Post for the Tiger"). In it, Little Tiger misses his friend Little Bear, who goes off to go fishing. He eventually hits on the idea of asking Rabbit if he could carry a letter home to Little Bear (he even remembers a stamp!). Rabbit happily obliges, and as word gets out that Rabbit delivers letters, he is given a uniform cap and they put up a few mailboxes to make Rabbit's life easier. 

Without doing a great deal of research on the world history of postal services, I can imagine it's not too far from reality. Messengers have existed since time immemorial, starting with people carrying individual messages, and eventually becoming available to the masses of Tigers and Bears who miss each other. 

Technical advances were adopted in their own time: rail transport, commercial ships at sea, air mail, and even a flirtation with rocket mail (sometimes called Missile Mail). Several countries theorized would be feasible as early as 1810. Practical experiments were conducted by many countries, and were abandoned as accuracy for the landing was difficult, especially in the context of getting mail from one large city to another. 

In a time before Zip codes, I remember the mail came twice a day. And even though my mother lived only a mile away from her mother, the letters went back and forth daily. The letter from Grandmother would arrive one morning, and my mother would pen or type her response in time for the afternoon pickup; Grandmother would receive it the next morning, and her response would go out in the evening post. After a year or so, they would return the letters to each other to serve as a quasi-journal. There were many dozens boxes of letters when we cleaned out her house, and we were simply not able to keep them all. 

Their correspondence continued throughout their lives, even as time and technologies inevitably marched forward: first to fall was the twice-daily post. Then came Mr. Zip®, the USPS character who introduced us to five-digit codes (instead of the combination of city and a two-digit code). We moved to a smaller town, and the morning mail came around midday; a move to a more remote place meant another day's delay and afternoon delivery. The price of stamps went up. And up. And yet, the two kept writing. I'm not sure what my Grandmother would have thought of nine-digit codes being scanned and sorted by machines.

But somewhere along the way, a pattern emerged: as I read through reams of chatty communications between them, there were holes, and they usually corresponded to major events like births, sudden illnesses, and deaths. The explanation was obvious: we started to pick up the telephone to make calls when the news couldn't wait a few days. 

The other casualty to time was a round-robin letter between the large family of cousins sharing the same grandfather. Every few months, a fat, worn envelope with layers of address stickers and a couple dozen letters would arrive at our home. We would read them all, then take out our last letter and insert a new one about the happenings of our family since then--sort of like an interim Christmas letter. There was always one cousin who had to be reminded that they needed to keep the packet moving, but it worked for decades.

Alas, two things spelled its demise. The first was the advent of email, which was not adopted by all at the same time. The second was that as the cousins aged and passed away, those names and letters dropped from circulation. The big manila envelope got thinner and thinner, until it was eventually replaced by group emails from and to those who used such things. 

The good news is that my mother, as the family historian, kept many years' worth of family round-robin letters; as I work my way through the relatively manageable stack, I hope to uncover more stories and pieces of information that help paint a more complete picture of who we come from. 

One of many letters from mother to daughter