Lizzie Borden Society Forum

Letters from family were quite an event before widespread use of the telephone. The following link shows examples of correspondences between farmers in the rural South from the 1840s to the 1880s. At that time, a letter would have been shared with several families. Woe betide the individual who didn't respond promptly! Harville Johnson was my great-great-grandfather, b. June 28, 1806. This past Wednesday was his 200th birthday.

http://us.geocities.com/freebirdnc/letters.htm

Gee thanks! That was interesting. I read one letter. The nephew was complaining that no one ever writes him! He said he had more letters and concern from strangers than from his own uncle and if that uncle planned on quitting writing him let him know (engendering a letter ) so he would quit looking for a letter.

That was neat!
I wonder how the person transcribing the letters to put on that site can even read some of the old handwriting.

On some old postcards I gotta give a lot of credit to the post office who got it to the right person.

I have a box of old postcards from my grandmother's house and most of them have only a name and city and they obviously arrived. Gee, technology seems to have made the post office less efficient!

The town where I live now is where my daddy's family originated and it was VERY small until just the last 20 years. One of the older cousins was the mail carrier, knew everyone and everyone knew him. If he got to the end of his route and had forgotten to leave a letter he would go back. Yeah, they would do that today! Of course it took him most of the day as he would be offered coffee and snacks along the way! Small town life was good!

Just this past week I was across the street on their swing bench just rocking and looking at my lovely house and Gil The Mailman came by. He had recently remarried and decided to take a break and fill me in. He told me to scoot over and he sat down and we swung while he told me all the news.

I wonder how many verbal messages a mailman might have "carried" before telephones. He might have been a good resource for sending a message a few blocks away in town.

When and where were the first mailmen I wonder?

Gil doesn't talk about my neighbors but does download his life to me...

I just took some time to read more of the letters and they are so interesting. I am a "retired" Civil War living historian so I went to the one dated in that time period first. Do you know what became of Edward Graham, Suffolk VA who is the soldier writing this letter?

I have no idea what became of Edward Graham, sorry! My primary focus has been the Johnson family, and the woman who posted the letters is interested in the Sears family. I'm at a dead end with Harville, he and Janeral and James were brothers. Janeral moved to Tennessee from North Carolina where Harville and James remained.

I have transcribed a few old (19th century) letters as well. The penmanship in those days was nothing short of awful, and makes doing this quite a chore. When we were kids, we used to regularly hear from elderly relatives about how "kids these days" (namely us) just didn't write like the old timers. Very true, but not for the reasons they thought.

Yes the handwriting is really hard to get used to!
Stefani has a journal by a man in Swansey from the late 1800's and I swear I went cross-eyed trying to get used to his writing.
Why do men always start a journal with the weather?

That's a good question, Kat. In the case of the Johnson families, they were farmers so the weather was a big determinant of how they were doing at the time. The current prices for commodities were also. In the more general sense of the question, maybe it serves two purposes. First, it takes up space in an obligatory document without getting into that touchy/feely stuff! Second, it is an indisputably correct statement, if stated factually. Your next door neighbor can't argue with it, and someone in the next state wouldn't know for sure, and would have to accept it! Actually, I think its just simply something that affects everyone, so it is used as an icebreaker often enough to just be automatic.

This journal Stef has is by a citizen of Swanzy and he seems to be a piano teacher in his home. He eats a lot of eels, too.

But I do now see what you mean about the *farming* mentality that might lead a man to cover the weather in his diary!
Here is an excerpt from Benjamin Earl's Diary from the Keeley Library.
http://www.sailsinc.org/Durfee/fulltext.htm
The citation is:
Life on the Stream / by Alice Brayton. -- [s.l. : s.n., 1962?] (Wilkinson Press)
    2 v.
Vol. 1-"Domestic Diary of Benjamin Earl, 1841-1843."

[Oh My Gosh- boring weather! ] I believe the entry shown is from 1841.