An Introduction

Hi y'all!
Emily here. As many of you know, Grandma aka Mary L. has been cleaning out the closets and getting rid of things. In the process, boxes and boxes of letters from our ancestors were uncovered. They were going to just be sent to a relative but then Frances and I started reading some and were fascinated! We volunteered to take the letters and start transcribing them so they could easily be read and shared. Sending a bunch of Word documents to everyone seemed a bit much, especially since I don't know who in the family might be interested in reading them. So I thought of posting them on a blog! This blog is available to anyone who has the address but it will not be listed on the Blogger.com site or on any search engines.

There is no order to when they are transcribed so I may type up one from 1897 and then skip to one from 1907. The title of each post will include the date the letter was written. I try to stay true to the original grammar and punctuation as much as possible, so things may seem a little "off"...

Typing up these letters has been so much fun! It is a combination of breaking a code (ever seen turn of the century cursive?), interpreting idioms, and looking up historic facts to help in both of the above. For example, I was stumped this evening by a sentence in which every other word was indecipherable. Often if there are proper names of people or places, it is harder to transcribe correctly. I was able to figure out eventually that there was a title of a book and the author's name was "Churchill." I googled "authors Churchill 1890s" and found a Wikipedia article about the American author Winston Churchill (of no relation to the Brit)! I scanned his list of books and found one named "Coniston" which fit with the letters I could decipher in the title! This is the kind of fun mystery I uncover in many letters.

The goal of this blog is to be able to share these fascinating letters with other members of the family and invite comments. I will try to include any fun and family facts that come up as well. Let me know what you think!

Peace,
Emily