Before profiles and bios, a New Zealander looking for a husband or a wife bought a line in the classifieds and wrote an ad. Every word cost money, so every word was chosen. This is what people decided was worth saying about themselves, taken from 955 columns of the Papers Past archive between 1870 and 1945.
Share of notices using each selling point, by era. In the 1800s the strongest thing you could say about yourself was that you had means and were respectable. By the 1930s people were more likely to say they were genuine, refined, or plainly lonely. The word friendship barely existed before 1920.
Tap a notice to keep it. Kept notices turn gold and collect in the tray, so you can come back to the phrasing when you write your own.
The whole constraint was the price. In 1917 the Marlborough Express ran twelve words for a shilling and charged a penny for every word after that, so brevity was not a style choice. Write your own notice below and it will be costed at the 1917 rate, checked for the selling points people actually used, and matched to the era it sounds like.
Nothing written yet.
Rate card: Marlborough Express, 11 January 1917
The same newspapers that sold the notices covered, with some relish, what occasionally became of the people who answered them.