Greetings from Canada

This collection of postcards from Dutch immigrants mailed to their homeland preserves and brings to light previously untold stories of people from various walks of life that ventured to Canada from the Netherlands in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These mini-diaries are historically and socially significant. They serve as tangible evidence of the legacy of Dutch immigrants, seldom found in the official records and statistics that serve as the main sources of information about the broader immigrant experience. The postcards include very personal snippets about the immigrants’ working lives, celebrations of milestones and poignant longing for a few words from home, revealing the aspects of their everyday experiences in the new country that they had shared with those they left behind.

Editions:

ISBN: 9781926991177 (paperback). $29.95 CDN.  Available via your local bookstore, Amazon or Indigo-Chapters.

Reviews:

Combining his hobby of postcard collecting with his knowledge of Dutch society at the turn of the nineteenth century and the forces that drove emigration, Krijff has been able to construct a clearer picture of the role that class played in the movement. Rich adventurers joined those who were looking for the “Land of the Second Chance.” The humble postcard, the “Twitter of its age,” reveals the hopes of the poor and the assumption of the well-to-do-in a few well-chosen words.

“Jan Krijff, because of his unique experiences, is probably the only one who could have assembled Greetings from Canada from his collection of postcards and given them a new form that helps explain the beginnings of Dutch immigration to Canada. He has combined the postcards with relevant pictures, documents and other ephemera that expand the relevance of the postcard and make it an important new historical resource in the jigsaw puzzle of history. ”

– from the foreword by Herman Ganzevoort
Professor Emeritus of the University of Calgary