Letters and family history

 

                                                                     Family letters can fill in some of the gaps

Letters can be a wonderful window into ancestor's lives. I'm lucky enough to have access to two collections of correspondence; one from my maternal grandparents and one from a 3 x great uncle, also one of my mother's relatives. Both sets of letters were one sided though. There were no copies kept of the answering letters. Still, there was enough information to fill in some blanks about their lives.

Placing them in context can make their actions more understandable. It can also lend depth to the narrative of their stories. My current task being, of course, getting one correspondent's tale down on paper. Readers of this blog will know I'm working on Alexander Matheson's story. He was my 3 x great uncle and led an interesting life. He outlined some of it to his sister, Margaret, after he finally discovered where she was living after 40 years. She must have kept those letters that he wrote.

He started writing to his sister in 1895 but I know from his correspondence that his use of the postal system started much earlier than that. In his letters to her, he mentioned the different post masters he had written to in Canada seeking news of the family he had lost. He was in a different country because, when he couldn't find his family, he moved across the border to the US in the late 1850s. 

But, although we now take postal service for granted, even call it disparagingly "snail mail", back in the 1850s it wasn't the same as it is now. So, as part of the research for Alexander's story, I decided to find out more about the postal system while Alex was using it. Not only was that the US postal system but also the postal system in Canada as well.

In Canada, new post offices tended to pop up where the rail lines went. It took a while for the railways to head west. The US had other events that opened up their postal system. According to a book that I read about that country's postal system, it really expanded with the California Gold Rush, followed a few years later by the US Civil War. Apparently, many soldiers kept up regular correspondence. Which makes me wonder who Alex wrote to while he was fighting in the Union Army. That correspondence would be an interesting find if it still exists. 

Sources:

Correspondence of Alexander Matheson – 1895-1920

Gendreau, Bianca; Willis, John; Brousseau, Francine, Special Delivery: Canada’s Postal Heritage, Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, N.B., 2000

Henkin, David M., The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006