A reference for old postcards
Found an old postcard?
Let’s find out where it came from.
Every postcard carries its own evidence — the layout of its back, the texture of its stock, the marks in its stamp box, the number in its corner. Postcard Origins reads that evidence with you, using dating tables from institutional archives, and tells you honestly when a date is exact and when it’s an estimate.
Here’s what that looks like on a real card. This Detroit Publishing view is stamped “Copyright 1900” on the front — but its divided back and 1910 postmark give it away as a reprint of that 1900 image, made between 1907 and 1910. We show you both, and which is which.
Every postcard on this site is one we scanned ourselves — not stock photos — and every date is traced to a published archive. See how this one was read →
Curt Teich number decoder
Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago was the largest postcard printer in the world, and its production numbers encode the year. Type the number from your card’s corner and get the year it was made — from the archive’s own dating tables.
Dating wizard
No Teich number? Six quick questions about your card — the dots test, the back, the border, the texture — place it in its era, from Private Mailing Cards to modern chromes.
Detroit Publishing decoder
The other giant with dated numbers: Detroit Publishing (1898–1932), the great photographic view publisher. Type your card’s number for its first-printing window — and learn the Roman-numeral trick that dates late cards exactly.
Postage rate lookup
Every US postcard rate change came on an exact date, and each one bounds your card. Pick the stamp amount you see — printed or affixed — and get its possible windows, 1873 to today.
New to all of this? Start with the complete method: how to date a postcard, from strongest evidence to weakest.
The six eras of the American postcard
- 1898–1901Private Mailing Card
- 1901–1907Undivided Back
- 1907–1915Divided Back
- 1915–1930White Border
- 1930–1945Linen
- 1945–Photochrome
Our dating tables come from published institutional and collector references — the Curt Teich Archives dating guide (Lake County Discovery Museum, 2011; published by the Newberry Library), the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and cross-checked collector directories. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than picking a number quietly.