No, but most of the people who are saying they’ve never heard of moving cards are plenty old enough to remember when a lot of mail was much more common. But we still get plenty of wedding invitations, birth announcements, Christmas cards and other personal correspondence.
On second thought, yes. We do get a lot of personal mail. Even my kids get a ton of birthday party invitations.
Last time I moved I ordered cards from Snapfish.com, got a cute picture of my daughter in a cardboard box printed beside our new address details, and sent them off. I don’t think they’ve disappeared, just changed form to something customised and unique.
I’m 54 yrs old and, in the greeting card context, I’ve never heard of them either. When we move we always use the post office change of address process.
When I was still in the Navy, I’d send snail mail to friends and family when I’d move - that would bring me up to the mid-80s. For a few years after that, I’d use Christmas cards to send our new address, or we’d tell our parents and they’d share among the relatives. Our last 2 moves - in 2000 and 2004 - were announced via email to some and Christmas cards to others.
And in all the years of me or my friends moving, in or out of the Navy, I never received a card specifically designed to tell me someone’s new address. Interesting concept…
This is why I have an ongoing postcard exchange with some of my friends from when we were at uni. Nothing like going to the letterbox and seeing a postcard from Stockholm or Hong Kong or Geneva or whichever exotic locale one of them has been to recently.
Sadly, I haven’t been anywhere more exotic than New Zealand recently, but one day I too will send postcards to my friends from Darjeeling or Havana or Dar-Es-Salaam and then [del]Zoidberg[/del] I will be the popular one!
But yes, I agree, I remember getting actual mail from relatives overseas as a kid - it was always exciting when you’d see an envelope with a London postmark on it from Aunty So-and-So. And to address (badum-tish!) the OP, I’ve never heard of the concept of “relocation cards” but I can see how they might have been a thing back in the days when international phone calls required NASA’s co-operation.
They only forward for a fixed period of time, so I’m not sure what your point actually is. Plus, I have no idea who is or isn’t going to mail me something over the next 6 months. And forwarded mail takes longer.
The USPS will forward mail for a change of address for a year. If you haven’t heard from someone in a year… And that also gives you the telling via Christmas card method.
Not in my experience. I used it in 2009 and 2011; I got forwarded mail for at least a year (I got a couple pieces at my current address definitely past the year mark, which was cool). I even got notification postcards reminding me that my mail forwarding would end in X weeks.