For nearly five years, hundreds of thousands of people have followed @longlostpersonals, discovering marriage advertisements, lonely divorcees, hopeful bachelors, and flamboyant swingers from decades past. Behind the account is an anonymous private collector whose home is filled with rare newspapers, magazines, and matrimonial publications dating back to the 1850s. What began as an unusual hobby has grown into what may be the world’s largest private collection of historic personal advertisements, and a remarkable record of how little our desire for connection has changed.
There are, it turns out, only so many ways to ask a stranger to fall in love with you. Technology changes. Language evolves. Handwritten letters become photographs, photographs become profile pictures, and profile pictures become swipes. Yet somewhere between a Victorian matrimonial newspaper and Hinge, the essential proposition remains uncannily familiar: Here I am. Might you be looking for me too?
In Chicago, a private collector has spent the past four and a half years building an archive around that exact proposition. Every day, he photographs a personal advertisement with his iPhone, carefully framing the page before posting it to Instagram. What appears online as a collection of screenshots is, in reality, a physical archive of historical fragments. Lining the shelves throughout his home are original newspapers, magazines, and matrimonial publications spanning every decade from the 1850s onward. “A lot of people don't understand that this is a physical archive,” he says. “I own these papers and magazines. It is very seldom that I post from a digital source.”
Like so many collections, his began with a photocopy. In 2008, a friend invited him to Chicago's Newberry Library, where he stumbled across an 1877 issue of The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser. Inside were hundreds of personal advertisements: strangers publicly describing themselves and the partners they hoped to find. “Some of them, even back then, said that they had photos they could exchange. I think one even referred to it as a daguerreotype. I found it so entertaining,” he recalls. Then he forgot about it. More than a decade later, during the COVID lockdowns, he rediscovered the photocopy while cleaning his apartment and thought, “Oh yeah — this thing is so fun.” What began as a bit of entertainment — reading the advertisements aloud to friends over FaceTime — soon turned into a search for more.
The first original publication he found was listed on eBay by a seller in France: an 1872 edition of The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser, published in London. The British advertisements surprised him. “The London ones are very much, ‘Looking for someone in the same station of life as me.’ The American ones had people saying things like, ‘We’re three young guys, we've got lots of money and want to blow it on some girls,’” he says, laughing. While he initially focused on anything old — “meaning up to the 1950s” — scarcity eventually pushed him towards later publications, through to the late 1990s. “At the time, I was not interested in the 1960s onwards because I didn't think it presented enough of a challenge to find, but obviously I soon learned the multiple mistakes present in that thinking,” he explains. He wishes he had been able to find more copies of The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser, partly because they reveal something that challenges the way we think about personal advertisements: they were not simply one-off appeals to strangers, but an ongoing conversation. “You get this thing where people in the publication are clearly responding to ads from previous editions. There were, like, four or five men all lusting after a woman named Nellie who had taken an ad out — in 1872!”
“Eventually I realised the later ads were just as fascinating, and could be just as hard to find,” he explains. Another publication he would desperately like to find more copies of is The Seattle Stranger, of which he owns four issues from the 1990s. As the collection grew, he began looking for a way to share it. Until then, he wasn't really doing anything with it beyond showing it to friends who came over. “We'd look through it and have a good time, but I didn't have an outlet to share it publicly.” Before starting his account, his relationship with social media had been almost nonexistent. “The only thing I used was Facebook, because I was of that era,” he says. Eventually, though, he caved and had a friend come over to teach him how Instagram worked. Growth was slow at first, but the account gradually found an audience through chance discoveries, shares from larger pages, and the peculiar luck of the algorithm. Even as the following grew, the archive remained the point. “I thought about this idea for the account for a really long time before I did it. By the time I finally got around to it, I had a pretty good collection of material.”
Finding those originals, however, has become increasingly difficult. Unlike books, newspapers of record, or political documents, personal-ad publications were rarely considered worth preserving. “People thought, ‘These people aren't looking anymore — we can toss this away.’” As a result, some periods are far better represented than others. Pre-1950 publications are especially scarce. “I've contacted some local US libraries and honestly, it's been pretty discouraging. This is a very niche thing and there is less out there than you think. Even at libraries,” he explains. History tends to preserve the monumental: wars, elections, famous speeches. Less often does it preserve the unassuming negotiations of ordinary lives. The earliest advertisements reflect that imbalance. Many are so formal and similar in tone that he suspects they were written, or at least heavily edited, by the publications rather than the people themselves. “You read them and then they all sound the same. None of them have any personality.” While not every publication adopted such a homogeneous tone, the pattern remained into the 1950s.
Naturally, the language of attraction was also shaped by the realities of each era. In nineteenth-century advertisements, financial security appears frequently. Men and women alike advertised income, inheritance, and property, while women often highlighted domestic accomplishments and social refinement. “They would say, ‘I can play piano and make a home happy.’” Then, every so often, someone breaks through the formality. One of his favourite advertisements comes from the very 1877 publication that started his collection. Written by a divorced woman, it contains a level of confidence that feels strikingly modern: “Having had experience, is prepared to enter at once upon her duties.” He looks up and laughs. “Okay. This woman wants to get laid.” As the decades move forward, the advertisements gradually become less about status and more about identity. The sexual revolution draws a visible line through the language. “Starting in the 60s, people started to get a lot more emotive around their interest and what they want out of life. From the mid to late 1960s, you start to get a lot of the kinky ads, the swinger ads…” By the 1980s and 1990s, people increasingly described themselves through music, television, and hobbies rather than occupation or income. The advertisements became less transactional and more autobiographical. Yet one thing appears to have changed: how openly people express loneliness.
“I'd say it's pretty common in the earlier ads for people to describe themselves as lonely,” he says. “I don't see that as much in recent ads. I think people fear they might come across as pathetic.” It is tempting to read this as a story of progress, although he is not so sure. “I think we don't really change that much. The words we use might change, the medium of course changes, but at our core we don't really change that much.” That observation may explain why the account resonates so deeply with followers, many of whom are encountering these voices for the first time. “I get so many comments… ‘Wow, I didn't know people thought like this in the 1960s or 1970s.’”
One day, he hopes the archive might exist beyond Instagram altogether. Inspired by the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb and Chiang Mai, he imagines a physical space where visitors could encounter the advertisements as objects rather than images on a screen, turning brittle pages and tracing the evolution of courtship one message at a time. “I like the idea of doing something like that. A physical space where [people] can come and look through ads,” he explains. For now, though, the archive remains online, where thousands of forgotten voices continue to find unexpected readers.
Asked what he hopes somebody might take from the collection 150 years from now, his answer comes without hesitation: “We want the same things. We're all lonely. We're all seeking something. We're all seeking connection. We're all seeking love.” Perhaps that is the archive's greatest trick. It does not simply preserve the past but dismantles the comforting fiction that people were ever all that different from us. Strip away the Victorian etiquette, the newspaper columns, and the classified fees, and every advertisement is ultimately saying the same thing: Here I am. I hope you're looking for me too.
Follow @longlostpersonals on Instagram to discover more forgotten declarations of love, lust, and longing. And if you have an old personal-ad newspaper, magazine, or clipping that deserves a place in the archive, get in touch at longlostpersonals@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared in Issue 08, published in August 2026. It was published online on November 5, 2026.