Happy Easter 1912!

A trip to the local drugstore at Easter time will furnish a plentiful selection of Easter greeting cards to send to friends and relations. The habit of sending holiday cards had become firmly established in Canada by the 1880s and was accelerated by the introduction of home mail delivery in the early 20th century. This development coincided with the appearance of postcards and resulted in floods of them conveying timely greetings flowing through the mail during every major holiday season.

Easter postcards often featured chicks, eggs, bunnies, tulips, daffodils, etc., helping to cement the association of these items with this occasion. For example, a postcard sent to Master E.



Spaulding of 24 Lyon Ave. in Guelph features two chicks riding in a tiny touring car, demonstrating how the old holiday kept up with modern times. No doubt this fun image made a nice addition to young Spaulding’s postcard collection.

It was also straightforward for people to create postcards customized with photographs that they had taken. This possibility meant that people could create personalized postcards for special occasions such as Easter. The good Reverend William Herbert Douglas of Rockwood did just that.

A neat family portrait was rendered as the image on the front of a postcard while a topical greeting was printed on the back: “Easter Greeting with best wishes from W.H. & Mrs.

Douglas, Lennox & Ryerson, Rockwood, April 7th, 1912.” William Herbert Douglas was born in 1873 in Reach Township, now a part of Scugog Township in Durham Region, to Samuel and Jane Douglas, recent emigrants from Ireland. Although Samuel and Jane were farmers, young William joined his older brother Thomas as a Methodist minister.

After missionary work in “the Canadian West,” William returned to Ontario and was ordained in 1900. During his career, he served congregations in Jarvis, Trafalgar, Rockwood, Port Elgin, Canfield, Norval, Lynden, Port Robinson and finally Mount Pleasant. His stint in Rockwood began in 1909 and lasted until 1912, not long after Easter.

During his stay, he gave sermons, performed weddings and funerals and spoke at special events. For example, he preached a sermon to the unconverted in November 1908, though records do not show how many heathens were in attendance. William retired in 1935 due to failing health and located to Toronto, where he died two years later.

I have found little information about William’s wife Martha (née Torrance), except that she was born in 1874 in Innisville (now Innisfil) and that the couple married on June 6, 1900. The couple’s first son, Lennox Herbert, was born in 1901 in Haldimand and grew up to become a doctor. He practised in a number of Ontario communities, eventually settling in Galt (now part of Cambridge), where he died in 1966.

His wife Margaret (née Kent) was the daughter of Hedley Kent, who had been a doctor in Truro, Nova Scotia, for nigh on 50 years, so presumably she knew what she was getting into. The second Douglas boy (and only other child), Wesley Ryerson Scott, was born in 1904 in Kemble, Bruce County. He attended high school in Georgetown, near Rockwood, and went on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1929.

He married Mary Aileen (née Moore) of Georgetown in 1932 and became a schoolteacher. After suffering a heart attack, he went on the apparently less stressful occupation of running his own brokerage firm on Bay Street in Toronto. He died in 1959 and was interred at Georgetown.

The Rev. Douglas’s Easter postcard was delivered to the McCarter family of Rockwood, who were members of the Methodist church. (Perhaps young Myrtle McCarter put the postcard in her collection.

) As with most greeting cards, the point of this postcard was to connect people in significant relationships, a minister’s family and his parishioners’ families in this case. So, happy Easter to you and your social circle from Flash from the Past! Interested in collecting or learning more about postcards? The next meeting of the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge Regional Postcard Club is May 4, 1:45 p.m.

, at the Christian Science Church in Kitchener. All are invited..