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.
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.
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.