Long before the personals moved online, Americans paid by the word to tell strangers what they wanted. The first century of the newspaper personal: what people asked for, how they said it, and who they wrote to.
In September 1904, a man in Omaha saw a young woman in a lavender dress board the westbound Farnam Street car a little after noon. He didn’t speak to her. Instead, a few days later, he paid the Omaha Daily Bee to print a notice asking her to write to box A-39. That notice is one of 53 we have transcribed from the original newspaper pages for The Personals Archive, and it looks remarkably like something posted online last week.
From the 1850s until the personals moved online in the 1990s, the newspaper personal column was where Americans went to say what they wanted to strangers. This is the story of its first hundred years. The ads are short, specific and often very funny, and read together they tell a history of courtship that rarely makes the textbooks: what people asked for, how they described themselves, and how they tried to reach one particular reader in a city full of them.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, most American city papers carried a column of short paid notices headed Personal or Personals. The most famous ran in the New York Herald, which from roughly the late 1860s printed its personals on the front page. Space was sold by the line or by the word, which is why so many ads read like telegrams: “WIDOWER of 45 wishes acquaintance of lady with view to matrimony. Box 210 Tribune.”
You will notice something odd about the capital letters in the ads quoted here, and it is not a typo. Newspapers set the first line of every classified ad in capitals to catch the eye, then switched to lowercase wherever that line happened to end. So an ad might begin A YOUNG LADY OF MEANS WILL BE and carry on in lowercase, and when the line broke mid-word, the capitals stopped mid-word too, as in AS REquested. We quote every ad exactly as it was printed, capitals included.
Almost every ad ended with a box number at the newspaper office. Replies were collected there, so the writer never had to print a name or an address, and a reader could answer without anyone in town knowing. Some writers used pen names instead, signing themselves Navy, Confidence or Opposite. It was an early, analog version of the anonymous messaging that personals apps rely on today.
Read enough of these columns and the same four kinds of notice keep turning up.
The largest group are ads for a husband or wife, usually built around the formula object matrimony, meaning the goal is marriage. They read like short contracts. A farmer in Walla Walla in 1905 described himself as “HONORABLE, INTELLIGENT, WELL to do” and wanted a lady not over 40. A widow in San Francisco in 1912 listed her qualifications, “excellent housekeeper, fine cook,” and what she wanted in return: a gentleman able to provide a comfortable home. Many added no triflers, the nineteenth-century way of saying serious inquiries only.
The second group will be familiar to anyone who read the back pages of an alt-weekly or the old Craigslist boards. They almost always begin with the same words, will the lady who, and then pin the moment down: a streetcar line, a seat, a time, an item of clothing. A Washington man in 1889 was looking for the young lady “WHO WORE BOUQUET OF pink roses on navy-yard car.” In 1912, someone in San Francisco was still looking for a woman seen in a box at the Tivoli seven years earlier, on the night Luisa Tetrazzini sang La Traviata.
The third group were never meant to be understood by most readers. They are private messages printed in public, between people who could not safely write to each other any other way. “ELAINE WILL ADDRESS LANCELOT AS REquested.” “CANNOT SEE YOU TODAY; Saturday’s letter received; will see you soon.” Other readers followed them the way people now follow a stranger’s thread, trying to reconstruct the story. The form was famous enough that fiction borrowed it, which we trace in Personal Ads in Literature.
The last group were searches: for a correspondent, or for someone who had drifted out of reach. In 1855 a woman in Gold Rush California placed a notice asking for news of her husband, who had left Massachusetts three years earlier. During the Civil War, women wrote to soldiers’ papers looking for correspondents in the ranks.
The striking thing about these ads is how plainly they talk about money. Men stated their savings and their property, and many asked for a lady of means in return. Women were just as direct. A young woman in New Orleans in 1877 opened with her own finances: “A YOUNG LADY OF MEANS WILL BE pleased to correspond with a young gentleman of position and polished habits.”
They were also frank about what they didn’t want, and occasionally about themselves. A Chicago woman in 1878 wrote, in its entirety, “A LADY OF 40 DESIRES THE ACquaintance of a few gentlemen over that age.” A New York man in 1862 described himself as “good looking but not handsome.” In 1927, a 22-year-old reader of a New York daily set her search radius in money, “about $2 fare from New York,” and ended with two words aimed at the professional marriage brokers: “No matchmakers.”
Nearly every ad in the archive names its reader. The Walla Walla farmer wanted a lady not over 40. A Salt Lake City man in 1907 wanted a “Gentile lady” of 35 to 40, using the local word for someone outside the Mormon church. With no other way to choose their audience, writers put the address into the ad itself.
That habit has outlasted the newspaper. On AseeksB, you choose who can see each post, by gender and age range, and Supporters can set distance too. Plenty of people still write their reader into the ad anyway, because naming who it is for is part of what makes a personal ad sound like a person.
Not every notice was what it seemed. The historian Pamela Epstein has described how, by the late nineteenth century, the Herald’s column had filled with fraudulent matrimonial agencies and thinly disguised solicitation, until critics called it the Red Light Column and the paper eventually dropped it. Other papers carried ads for marriage brokers and patent remedies right beside genuine personals. For this archive we left out notices that read as solicitation, along with business ads and agency ads, and kept to people writing for themselves.
By the 1930s and 1940s, the character of the column had shifted, at least in the mainstream dailies. In the Washington Evening Star issues we checked from those decades, the personal column carried far more notices about lodging, work and services than about courtship. The personal ads that remained were often about finding company of any kind: someone to study shorthand with in the evenings, a club for non-smoking, cultured, middle-aged people, and, five days after D-Day, a complete ad in seven words: “IF YOU PLAY SKAT, communicate with Box 389-K, Star.”
The romantic personal came back in force later in the century, in alternative weeklies and literary magazines. By the 1980s, according to the Smithsonian’s history of the form, personals were running everywhere from the Village Voice to the New York Review of Books, written in a new shorthand of abbreviations because papers charged by the word. Our Personals Dictionary covers that vocabulary, from ISO to GSOH to SWF.
Then the column moved online. Craigslist began in 1995 as an email list and grew into one of the largest personals boards in the country, until it closed its US personals on March 22, 2018. What happened next is the subject of our series The Return of the Personal Ad, beginning with what happened to Craigslist Personals.
Every ad quoted here, and every other ad in the archive, has its own page with the full transcription, a link to the original newspaper page at the Library of Congress, a plain-English reading, and a citation. You can browse the archive by decade or by theme, from missed connections to coded messages, or look up the language of the form in the Personals Dictionary.
And if you have read this far, you already know how the form works. Say who you are, say what you want, and say who it is for.
Write your own personal ad, choose exactly who can see it, and let the right reader answer. Free on iOS and Android.
Ads seeking a husband or wife appeared in English newspapers by the 1690s, and by the middle of the nineteenth century most American city papers ran a column of short paid personal notices. The oldest ad in The Personals Archive on AseeksB is from 1855.
Most fell into four kinds: marriage ads built around the phrase object matrimony, missed connections that began will the lady who, coded messages between two people, and searches for a correspondent or for someone who had lost touch. Replies usually went to a numbered box at the newspaper office.
It means the writer’s purpose is marriage. Object meant goal or aim, and the phrase told readers the writer was serious. It was one of the most common formulas in nineteenth-century personal ads.
By the 1930s and 1940s many mainstream dailies’ personal columns carried more notices about lodging, work and services than about courtship. Romantic personals returned in alternative weeklies and literary magazines later in the century, then moved online. Craigslist closed its US personals section on March 22, 2018.
AseeksB is a free, text-first personal ads app for iOS and Android. You write what you are looking for in your own words and choose who can see each post by gender and age range. An optional Supporter upgrade adds distance targeting and other extras.