Sometimes, the place that your family calls home can have some fun facts associated with it that add interest to your family history. This is one of the reasons that I like family history books – they add depth to the information that is found in family trees. For my family, one of the fun facts about the city where my mother and father were raised as well as the town that they live in (and where I was raised) has to do with Valentine’s Day.
Both my mother and my father were raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. My mother was not born there, but her family moved there when she was a child. When they married, they bought a home in the nearby town of Grafton and they live there still. Both of these places are associated with Valentine’s Day.
In the late 1800’s, a woman named Esther Howland (of Worcester, Massachusetts) received a Valentine’s Day card from someone in England. She was so impressed by the card that she made some for her friends, who were likewise impressed. Coincidentally, Esther’s father owned a stationery store in Worcester. She decided to make some cards and place them in the store to see if they would sell. The cards were a hit, and soon Esther was able to hire her friends to make cards with her because of the demand for them.
It is uncertain whether Esther Howland was the first official commercial producer of Valentine’s Day cards in America. Another individual, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, Massachusetts, may have been making and selling Valentine’s Day cards for a few years before Esther Howland. The history of the Valentine’s Day card in America is associated with the place that my family calls home. That is a fun and interesting tidbit of information that I will take care to preserve through writing it in either a family history scrapbook or other book of family history stories so that future generations can enjoy learning about it.
Photo by ladyheart on morguefile.com.