Duffield/Sisson Postcards No. 17

This is the seventeenth in a series of postcards from 1908-1914 discovered last year in the Sierra Madre, California home of Warren Brown after his death. The collection of memorabilia was saved by his grandparents and passed down to Warren, my husband’s cousin.

Warren’s mother, Edythe Grace Sisson (1897-1978), was the daughter of Edith Amy Duffield (1864-1926) and Charles Herman Sisson (1868-1927). Charles and Edith were married in Ottawa, Illinois in 1895. They remained there until the early 1920s when they moved west to Los Angeles, California.

East Entrance Golden Gate, Yellowstone National Park.

An interesting thing about this postcard is the texture caused by embossing some of the landscape features. Trees, rocks, and mountain tops are highlighted this way.

The stamp skews the postmark a bit, but it looks like Sept 15 at 7pm. I can't make out the year on the postmark, but the year is included in the handwritten date.

Downer's Grove

Sept 15 1909

 Mrs Edith Sisson

Ottawa

Ills

408 Marcy St

Dear Edith

I am come

down

18 Sept to see

see you from

your *love?*

Antie *J?* C

I believe this was written by Edith's Aunt Jane, though the signature is just initials and hard to read. The handwriting matches a card written by Jane just a few weeks earlier and I know she lived in Downer's Grove, Illinois.

Jane Wright (Duffield) Cross (1850-1932) was the daughter of Robert Duffield (1810-1885) and Mary Wright (1812-1875) and youngest sister of Edith's father, William Duffield (1833-1925). Jane grew up in Ottawa, but moved with her family to Downer's Grove in the late 1870's when niece Edith was a teenager. Visits back and forth were frequent. Jane's husband, Alfred, died before the 1910 census and may have already passed when Jane wrote this note to her niece to plan the next visit. Telephone service was still in its infancy in the Chicago area at the time of this postcard and likely that at least one of the households, maybe both, had not installed a phone. Even if they had, the call was considered long distance and would have been very expensive to make.