The Letters

Author’s Note

The letters in the collection are in chronological order according to their date. Each one begins with a short synopsis of the contents, followed by the transcribed letter, followed by a link that will take you to the original document.

The letters were discovered following the passing of my elder sister, Jeannie, in 2021. After her estate had been finalized, my niece Kimberly and I, found a cache of letters in a box that had been stored between one attic and another for nearly two hundred years. These meticulously handwritten letters numbered 264 in total, spanning the years 1844 and 1940. I transcribed 253 of them, comprising eighty-seven from 1844-1854, ninety-nine from 1854-1872, and sixty-seven from 1872-1940.

These precious letters had journeyed through generations and households, originating in Kentucky, where they were initially saved by my great-great-grandmother, Henrietta Brooking Gex. Subsequently, they passed to her son, my great-grandfather, Robert Brooking, who had moved to Missouri. From there, they continued their journey to Robert Brooking’s daughter, my great-aunt Frances, and eventually to my father’s sister, Mary Gex Brown. Their next stop was Spencer, New York, with my sister Jeannie, before they ultimately landed in Suffield, Connecticut with Jeannie’s daughter, my niece Kimberly. The box housing these letters seemed untouched by time until Kimberly and I opened it in 2021. Expecting some letters written by my grandfather in the mid-1930s, we were amazed to see the yellowed bundles, tied with string, lying there before us.

Recognizing the historical significance of these letters, I embarked on the laborious task of transcribing them, facilitated by Kimberly, and her husband Ernie, who diligently scanned the documents. Given their age, the letters exhibited varying degrees of preservation. While most of them remained remarkably well preserved, others bore signs of wear, ranging from smudges to tears, and some were mere scraps. With the exception of a few penned in pencil, the majority were handwritten in ink. Initially, deciphering the handwriting was a daunting challenge, but slowly, I became accustomed to the script, the usage of words, punctuation, spelling, and abbreviations. Some of the handwriting was so elaborate, that that fact alone made it hard to read. Others were scrawled in such a careless manner, that reading and deciphering them was torture.

To complicate matters, many people had nicknames and might be referred to by their actual name in one place in the letter, and by their nickname later on in the same letter. Abbreviations for names were also used, as was the complication of so many with the same name. For instance, four daughters of my fifth great-grandmother, Henrietta Richardson, each named one of their daughters Henrietta. Similarly, several relatives bore the name Laura, further complicating the identification process. Thus, distinguishing which specific Henrietta or Laura was being referenced in each letter proved to be a formidable task. 

Despite the often-monotonous nature of the work, I did my best to transcribe each letter while at the same time, I became captivated by the lives and the world that my ancestors lived in. I hope that you find them as interesting as I did.

Karen Gex Asfour
2024