Correspondence and journals

      The postcard above comes from Sandi Ratch: see below

The importance of surviving correspondence cannot be overstressed in offering all kinds of insights into the minds and hearts of people.

One particularly interesting website deals with a two-way postcard correspondence between relatives in Banffshire and in Canada. It is the meticulous work of Sandi Ratch who also designed the logo for SAfraeSA for us. It is an on-going work but well worth exploring.http://dearjackhistory.blogspot.com/ ​

Letters had many purposes and were kept for many different reasons. Not all ever reached their intended recipients during their migrations. There is a thick volume, for example, of Undelivered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America 1830-57: Edited by Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss

There are also published volumes of letters from the most famous characters like The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806-1808 edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb in the Voyageur Series.

One very important genre of letter, the letter of introduction, facilitated the entry into the existing community abroad of the new immigrant. Margaret Dougherty highlights one written for her ancestor at

http://neverendingfamily.blogspot.com/2020/06/i-wrote-here-abut-when-my-grandfather.html