Above: “A Leap Year Proposal” postcard addressed to Miss Carrie Ward, 1909 (SPRA 1969.60.397)
While the postcard featured above appears to have been sent as a joke, the existence of a proposal postcard in the first place makes one wonder about the links between the post and marriage.
The story of Miss Sandra Stenrons, published in the Daily Herald Tribune on July 25, 1916, gives one clue. Miss Stenrons had travelled alone more than 2,000 miles from New Hampshire to marry a Grande Prairie area rancher whom she had never met. It is likely that these two were introduced through a marriage club.
As the west opened for mass settlement, newcomers were often single men, leading to a shortage of suitable spouses in the region. Businesses stepped up to address this shortage, selling personal advertisements and creating catalogues to try to match men out west with eligible young women. Interested couples would correspond through letters before deciding to marry. Of course, such mail matches did come with a level of risk, as Miss Stenrons discovered. Upon arriving in Grande Prairie she found not a well-to-do rancher as advertised, but a man who “could support only a bare living.” And so, Miss Stenrons returned home alone to New Hampshire.
Mail romances were especially prevalent during the war years, as young couples were brought together and separated by the conflict. After meeting briefly in 1941, Ursula and Dick Lewis wrote letters throughout the war that progressed their relationship from May 16, 1942 when Dick apologized for going “a little romantic on [her]“ to November 6, 1945 when he wrote “I know it is late but I just can’t go to bed without telling the most wonderful girl in the world how much I love her” and to express his joy she had agreed to marry him (SPRA 195.01) Another young man, Arnold Dryer, even proposed to his sweetheart, Vi, in a letter, writing “as for asking you properly I don’t know about that, no fooling, dear, will you marry me at the first chance we get?” (October 8, 1944, SPRA 259.02).
These examples show some of the ways that mail could lead to marriage. Given these links it does seem fitting that the Grande Prairie Herald reported on March 3, 1914 that the first parcel to arrive in Grande Prairie under the new parcel post system was in fact two boxes of wedding invitations.
This article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Telling Our Stories.
