A few years back, Shirley and I were talking at work about her genealogy. She is very enthusiatic about her research and is always telling us about new things she’s discovered about her family history (check out her genealogy help pages on the right hand side of this page). One of the things we talked about that day was a group of letters that a relative had passed on to her, written by a great grandmother, I believe (it may have been even further back than that….I’ll have to ask.) But what we discussed was the contents of these letters, talking about what was going on in this person’s life at the time, just common things about running the farm and who had been ill. The letters were sent back and forth as a sort of conversation across the miles, much like we’d have on the phone or through email today. The difference though, is that they are a “permanent” record of the lives during that time.
We were lamenting that the past few generations have lost the art of letter writing, that we don’t have any of these records now of our lives, telling how we felt during certain events or what exactly took place. Years from now, there probably won’t be any record of emails we sent to Aunt Lucy or text messages to Dad about being late for dinner. So how will the next few generations know what we were all about as people? How will they know what we did from day to day and how we felt about our lives? Unless you keep a written diary, there probably won’t be any data that your great, great grandchildren can access. They’ll never know that you were heartbroken about losing a close friend, or elated at buying your first home. It will all be lost.
That conversation started me thinking about my little niece who was only a year or so old at the time. I thought, what can I do for her that will help her to understand what our lives are like today, what her family is like and going through during her young years? So I started a journal for her. I began writing her letters talking about just those things, as well as including pages on anything that I thought she might find interesting about her family history. She might never be told that her great grandmother had a red velvet chair that everyone in our family coveted. Or that her grandfather helped to deliver milk as a young boy. There are things that just might not be asked, and even if she is told, will her children know? Will theirs? I’m hoping that this journal will be something she’ll keep and pass along someday, as a bit of a record of my generation.
Laura, one of the mommies who comes to storytime with her children, passed along an article to me from her university alumni magazine. It tells of a new book written by Jenna Bailey called “Can Any Mother Help Me?”
which was born out of a loose papers that she found while looking for an idea on which to write her thesis. The pages were from a magazine that a group of women known as the Coopperative Correspondence Club (or the CCC) created as a way to talk about issues that affected them as wives and mothers. The letters they wrote back and forth were written using pen names so that the women could vent freely and other women would write responses on the pages, much like blogs use comments today. Instead of an online discussion group that you might find today, these mother found ways to help each other through correspondence. Ms. Bailey even managed to get many of these mothers together years later to meet for the first time. To find out more about the author or the book, you can go to her website here.
I found it interesting that the only book we have in our library which is specifically about the art of writing letters, called “The Art of Letter Writing” by Lassor A. Blumenthal
was published in 1977, well before we all started using the internet for our general correspondence. Of course there are books which can help you write a cover letter for a resume, and ones which will guide you with the proper formatting of a letter, but your word processing program can do the same things for you.
Where will this all go? Will we lose letters entirely? What do you think?
The world seems to be going back to a sweeter time in history, just as we move forward with technology at a blazing rate. We seem to be craving all of those unique services that were personal and meant something more than an email, and Telegram Stop is just such a service. 
I especially love that although this person completely forgot the name of one of the people she was sending the card to, at least she didn’t leave them out altogether. And what about this nice sentiment from someone’s aunt and uncle:
I’m not sure why someone would send a card like this, although it was under the heading “two birds with one snowman”, which sums it up. Thanks to the people at 
