I'm fortunate that my father never tossed a piece of paper! It was a massive task sorting through all of his files after his death. You'd be going through a stack of old magazine article clippings, and find some unique family photos mixed in. Always had to sort down to the last piece of paper.

Here is a cover that many people would toss. It's card size, so oversize for most collecting tastes. But it's family history. My sister was born on November 1st, 1960 so this was a new baby card sent from my grandmother in Jersey City, NJ on November 3rd to my mother in the hospital.

My father was an army officer stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas at the time so my sister was born in Irwin Army Hospital on the post there.

The card arrived at the hospital on November 5th, but my mother had gone home at that point, so the card was forwarded to our home address. That forwarding appears to have taken two days also, and the post office slapped a seven cent bounty on the forwarding. So the cover is philatelicly interesting.

The bonus, aside from documentation of family history is that I had no other record of our address in Kansas! I was able to bring up the house in Google Street View and saw some of the aspects of the house and neighborhood that my mother used to talk about.

I was two at the time, and the big story was that I was in the driveway in my kiddie pool. The house shared a driveway with the house next door and the teenager next door came thundering up the driveway and hit the pool right after I had been retrieved, saving me from becoming a small stain on the driveway. Sure enough, Google showed me that shared driveway!

 
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