77. The Archaeology of a Box: (3) My Grandparents' Victorian Greeting Cards

Archaeologists expect to uncover layers of history as they excavate, dating artefacts as they go. On some sites, however, there is conflict over which history is to take priority. At the Palace of Knossos in Crete, for example, the bulk of the ruins on display are of the Minoan period but the sites there also include Roman, Greek and Mycenaean remains. Minoan Knossos was largely destroyed by natural disaster around 1700 BCE, then rebuilt by the Minoans only to be destroyed by a Mycenaean invasion around 1500 BCE. When the Mycenaeans left it became a Greek city subsequently occupied by the Romans until around 400 CE.

My box of treasures was originally constructed largely on the same natural principle of earlier artifacts and mementoes being at the bottom and more recent ones added layer by layer on top. Since that time, however, it has been packed and repacked so often that things are all over the place chronologically. So now it is as though some archaeologist dug down at Knossos to the Minoan level pulling out pieces of Greek, Roman and Mycenaean history and culture along the way and then jumbled them all up and packed them back into the ground to leave others to puzzle as to what came when from where.

For next from my box is a box within the box - a thin flat box falling apart at the edges. In this box are more greeting cards, these dating from the late nineteenth century. Only one has a date on it - 1898.

 

 

These are cards exchanged by my grandfather and grandmother on my mother's side, keepsakes from their courtship and marriage, and passed on to me by my mother. A few are reproduced above.

My mother’s family were from Edinburgh. Her mother Kate, my Grannie Henderson, had eight children only three of whom lived, my Aunt Lena (b.1906), my Uncle Peter (b.1907) and my mother Catherine (always known as Cathy; b.1910).

 

Before her marriage my Grannie Henderson (nee Thomson) had been in service as a table maid. My grandfather, Peter Henderson, owned two family grocery shops in Edinburgh but he died in 1944 so I scarcely knew him.