The House is still there, looking very much as it did in the photo. The awnings have gone though, and that's too bad. And the traffic in the street has more horsepower now. That's also too bad. Not that I had actually paid any attention, then or later. I had no idea that 340-14th had any significance whatever in my personal history. If I even noticed it in the twenty odd years I lived in the neighbourhood, it would have been as just another unremarkable Victorian home on an equally unremarkable residential street. But then, I didn't know about the postcards.

The postcards are compelling to be sure, all of them carefully preserved, most of them with some connection to 340-14th, some of them with a reference that I could recognize, some with no clues to help me interpret them. The majority are addressed to Emma Robertson and without doubt she is the one who kept them. Possibly hid them. Emma is really my only link to this story and so it is with her that I have to begin.

Emma moved from rural Manitoba to live in Brandon permanently in 1927. That much I knew, but to find out she was there twenty years earlier was a surprising and quite mysterious discovery in the life of someone I thought I understood. So here's how it came about: In the early days of Brandon College, now Brandon University, a group of Baptist academics set up 340-14th Street as a guest house for visiting scholars and clerics. It was not a particularily large house, but it did have several rooms to offer to a few of the right sort of boarders.

Between the years 1905-1910, the house was operated by Emma, her Mother Margaret and possibly her sister Marion. From time to time Emma's brother Peter stayed at the house, as did several friends and relatives. Between visits, they kept in touch through the new medium of the postcard. This was a quick and welcome method of communication when there was not time to compose a longer message. The messages are usually short, sometimes terse, and certainly there were many more letters and cards that have not survived. Emma's postcards are only a tiny fraction of the mail at 340-14th, and the snippets of information contained here can only be a tantalizing hint at the whole story.

 So the discovery continues. Each one of the postcards here will take you to a different part of the collection. And each has several links imbedded within it. You can click on the picture side of any postcard to simply see the "next' card in the stack, or click on the text to follow a writer. Or you may wish to click on a stamp, a dateline, an address, or a postmark. Each choice will yield a different story. And each story will unfold in its own way. Thank you Emma.