There are many guarantees, including that the birds are "Guaranteed Genuine Imported, Male Hartz Mt. and St. Andreasburg Rollers." That refers to Harz Rollers (from the mountains of Germany), and St. Andreasberg Rollers, which are a substrain of that canary.
That $4.95 pricetag (payable in installments of 50 cents per week) would be a whopping $92 today. And of course Keystone Furniture was happy to also sell you a cage and stand to go with your pricey songbird.
From roughly the 1880s through the mid-1930s, hundreds of thousands of German canaries were shipped to the United States each year. It was quite the prosperous trade, though all I can think about are the birds being shipped across the Atlantic and then across the United States.
According to an article by Robert Francis on the website US Bird History, "These birds mostly came from Germany, where there were entire villages whose primary industry was breeding and selling canaries. Shipping these birds was an exhausting, treacherous work that rested on the backs – sometimes literally – of traveling merchants."
Merchants might carry 200 hundreds birds on their back to reach market. The best birds were saved for German buyers, who would pay exhorbitant prices, Francis explains. After that, sellers focused more on the hardiness of the birds, rather than their singing ability, in deciding which ones to send across the Atlantic.
"If Fritz could make it to New York with 85 percent of his canaries still breathing, both he and his employer would be happy," Francis writes, citing the 1888 book Canaries and Cage-Birds by George Holden.
It would have been far more humane in 1929 to just buy Mom some flowers or chocolate, either of which would most likely have been produced domestically. (That's not necessarily the case today, when the great majority of Mother's Day flowers and chocolates and imported and there are real concerns about the labor practices in the countries providing them to us.)
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