Treasures and Findings

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my good fortune when my friend Sue passed along to me a bag of "loot" from a yard sale. 

{A photo to jog your memory!}

Well, she wasn't done with her surprises!  She also picked up a photo album/scrapbook full of photos and postcards from Europe in the 1950s.  When she finished looking through it, she decided to pass it along to me, as well!

{I love the look of a scrapbook bursting with postcards and ephemera!}

A plastic bag at the front of the book held Western Union telegrams from 1950 wishing the family Bon Voyage as they headed to Europe on the Queen Mary.  There was a passenger list from their journey, menu cards, hotel pamphlets, a postcard from Holland, and a letter still in the envelope with stamps worth 7 cents--enough to send a letter from Connecticut to Paris in 1952!

The funniest thing in the bag was an article clipping with the headline:  "'Fondue' is the National Dish; Doesn't Go With Cold Drinks."  The article explains that drinking cold drinks while eating fondue can "turn cheese to a hard lump in the stomach with dire consequences." 

The book itself is filled with photos and postcards from this family's travel in Europe during 1951-1952.  It seems as though they moved to Paris for work, and then used that city as their home base to travel all over the continent.  There are photos from Paris, Brussels, Pompeii, Capri, Rome, Monaco, Amsterdam, Bonn, Strasbourg, Lucerne, London, and Edinburgh, to name only the "biggest" names.

The family appears to have two teenage girls.  A brochure included in the scrapbook tells me that high school tuition for the American Community School in Paris costs $100 a term! 

I can tell they have a certain sense of humor:  in addition to a family photo aboard the Queen Mary, there is a photo of a stuffed panda bear on a deck chair:

The scrapbook gives me such a window into the lives of these complete strangers from another time.  In addition to plenty of impersonal postcards of European cathedrals, there are photos that feel so immediate and personal:

There are some great 1950s-era graphics on the brochures that have been stashed away among the pages:

There is even a sprig of dried flowers among the spread from their travels in Edinburgh, Scotland:

(Edinburgh, and especially Edinburgh Castle, is especially close to my heart, because that's where my husband proposed to me in 2004!)

I have NO idea what I am going to do with this album.  Somehow it's easier to cut, paste, paint, and collage on an individual photo or piece of ephemera I might encounter at a yard sale.  But I pause to do these things to a personal collection of such scale! 

I am curious:  if such a collection were in YOUR hands, what would you do with it?  I really would like to know.