From One Postcard to a Family History

I began with a 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition postcard addressed to two young girls in Lyle, Washington. It was signed only “Grandma Sorensen.” The message mentioned “Mother & Daddy,” “our 5 girls,” a long drive, and another day at the World’s Fair.

The initial questions were simple: Who was Grandma Sorensen? Who were the recipients? And what could one ordinary postcard still tell us more than 85 years later?

I traced the postcard through genealogical and historical records, newspapers, obituaries, cemetery records, local-history collections, postal history, maps, photographs, and archival sources.

As stronger evidence emerged, I corrected earlier assumptions rather than forcing them to fit. I separated documented findings from reasonable interpretations and unresolved questions.

I identified Grandma Sorensen as Edith Anna Clark Sorensen and reconstructed the immediate Omeg/Sorensen family behind the postcard. The research uncovered the family’s connection to early rural mail service: Edith’s husband Van carried mail by boat and horseback, while her younger brother Byrd later crossed the Columbia River by rowboat and once protected mail sacks aboard a leaking steamer.

The work also explained why a postcard addressed only to two girls and a town could successfully reach the correct rural family in 1939.

Three of the five girls mentioned in the postcard were identified. Two remain unknown, and I deliberately left them that way rather than substitute speculation for evidence. That evidence discipline is a central part of the finished project.

What began as the investigation of a single piece of ephemera became a documented family and regional history connecting genealogy, transportation, postal history, local communities, the 1939 World’s Fair, and the Columbia River.

The final two-part article preserves both the research trail and the uncertainties that remain. Read the completed Part 2 article through the project link.