Man exchanges birthday card with cousin that's been in their family since 1936

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- It was Tom Rose’s 82nd birthday recently, which meant something for his cousin Richard Rose – time to mail the card the men exchange each year.

The cousins have been mailing this card back and forth, between Tom who lives in Sacramento and Richard who is 78 and lives in Colorado Springs, for close to 20 years. Prior to this, Richard’s father Manuel “Mike” Rose and Tom’s father Aneble “Al” Rose sent the card to one another for almost a half century, from the card’s purchase around the beginning of 1936 until Mike’s death in 1985.

“I lock that card every year after Tom sends it to me in my safe,” Richard said. “And then a week before it’s his birthday, I take it out of the safe and send it off to him. And, of course, him and I have gotten to the point where we both insure that card through the post office, because it has so much meaning to both of us.”

The tradition the cousins follow might be unusual in how long it’s gone on. But they’re not the only family with a long-held, idiosyncratic ritual around an heirloom. In a world where extended families are increasingly far-flung, it’s traditions like these that can help families maintain connections across decades.

How this tradition got started

Mike and Al Rose were the youngest of more than a dozen children, born in 1905 and 1908 respectively to Frank and Mary Rose, who were immigrants from the Azorean islands.

The brothers grew up and made their adult lives in San Francisco. Mike worked for the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Al worked in a variety of capacities, including as a driver for the San Francisco Department of Public Works until his retirement.

Mike first sent the card to Al for his birthday in January 1936. The card offered standard greetings, but also noted, “It costs nothin’ to wish ye well and I’m strong for good wishes. Well, here’s one for both o’ us, a card of mutual birthday cheer.”

It added, “P.S. Mail it back to me again next on my birthday, then I’ll mail it back – he’ll mail it back – etc. – etc.”

The brothers would take these instructions to heart, appearing to have sent the card back and forth to one another every birthday they had from 1936 to 1985, writing the date inside each time.

Richard remembered his Uncle Al as a laidback man with a nice backyard who always had little projects he was working on. As for Tom, he said his Uncle Mike had a large voice and was a big man whose size could intimidate people, though he was a genial man and got along well with Al.

“They were really close,” Tom said. “I mean, not only as kids but until they had both passed away. They were very, very close and they were always around. So I would imagine my uncle bought it as kind of a gag and it just kept going on for years and years and years.”

Richard remembered when his dad would receive the card.

“My mom and dad would always giggle and laugh, because here it comes again from my uncle’s end,” Richard said. “I don’t know if he had any comments about it, but I’m sure he enjoyed it.”

Why these kinds of traditions endure

In Crista Cowan’s family, there is also a tradition: Carefully unwrapping gifts so the wrapping paper can be reused. Some wrapping paper in her family lasts 10, 12, even 15 years.

“I think it’s so funny because the origin of it came from my grandmother being a child of the Depression and not wanting to throw anything away but now it’s just a fun family tradition,” said Cowan, an in-house genealogist for Ancestry. “Like, it’s not that we can’t afford to go out and buy any roll of wrapping paper but the fact that we continue to do that kind of almost in honor of her is fun to think about.”

There are different reasons that families wind up with intergenerational traditions or heirlooms. For one thing, it’s getting easier to share heirlooms with the world. Cowan said that 125 million records have been uploaded to Ancestry, everything from old recipes to photos of wartime medals family members might have received.

Ancestry rolled out a technological update in recent weeks called Ancestry Networks that allows people who aren’t related to connect, if they might share a common bond between an item, say an old group photo that they might each have an ancestor in.

Beyond this, heirlooms can endure because of their accumulated value, though this value is necessarily monetary or even inherent, according to Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, a UC Davis history professor and author of “America Under the Hammer,” a new book about historic auctions.

“Value isn’t really intrinsic,” Hartigan-O’Connor said. “It’s a human – it’s a social creation, that value comes from human relations and humans’ opinions about an object.”

Hartigan-O’Connor spoke of the idea of a family going on the television show “Antiques Roadshow” with an old cake pan, something that might have been used to make a favorite holiday cake each year and the family being dejected to learn the pan has minimal monetary value.

“There’s this disappointment, ‘Oh, that’s not its real value,’” Hartigan-O’Connor said. “But the price doesn’t mean that that’s the real value, either.”

Asked about how the 89-year-old card that Tom and Richard exchange might rank in relation to other heirlooms she has researched, Hartigan-O’Connor said the card was a beautiful example of social value, even if the paper and materials used to create the card weren’t expensive.

“It’s the stories and the history that it passed through that give it value,” Hartigan-O’Connor said. “So it’s less the rarity than the community that is built around that card.”

There’s also what traditions and heirlooms can do to keep people together.

“We live in a world that is so disconnected, despite the fact that technology keeps us more digitally connected than ever before,” Cowan said. “And I think little things, like that families can engage in traditions, the sharing of story, the passing down of heirlooms in intentional ways, I think that develops and nurtures greater bonds of connection than I think we realize.”

How this tradition lives on

After Mike’s death in 1985, his brother Al lived another quarter-century, dying in 2011 at the age of 103. For most of this time, though, the tradition of exchanging the card within the family was dormant.

“We didn’t do it for a long time,” Tom said. “We were busy raising our families and I was in the Air Force and we didn’t – we didn’t trade the card back and forth for quite awhile.”

Finally, in 2004, Tom and Richard began to send it back and forth to one another. The two had been close to one another, with Tom an only child and Richard having an older brother he wasn’t as close with as he would have liked.

Now, the cousins are hopeful about being able to keep the tradition going. They have yet to make firm plans for future generations of the family to carry the tradition on. But Richard is hopeful about what the two of them might be able to do together.

“I just sent Tom a message the other day,” Richard said. “I said, ‘Think we can do this for 11 more years so it’ll be 100 years old?”

Talking about what the card meant to him, Richard began to get choked up, saying the card made him and Tom feel like they were still connected.

“It makes us want to call and just chew the fat for a few minutes and reminisce about growing up,” Richard said. “I was the brother he never had and he was the brother I always wanted.”