Papa's Letters to Camille . . .

My sister, Herrise, sent me selected copies of the letters my grand father wrote to my grand mother just prior to their marriage.  She did not send all of them, just the ones she need for a application to get Angeles House in to the National Historical Registry.  I then transcribed the letters into Microsoft Word, made some minor corrections is spelling and punctuation as well as formatting so that each letter did not run on into the next, a pagination effort.

It was interesting reading.  My grandfather married is second cousin and had to get permission from the Archbishop in New Orleans.  He had to get a dispensation regarding the marriage of his cousin.  He got the dispensation and the rest is history, family history now.

My mother transcribed the letters on her old portable Underwood Type Writer.  A laborious job at best and just plain toil at worst for her to do.  But those letters are a treasure.  There are about 30 of them, written on steam boats, at his "cabin" or house really, a mailed on a steam boat.  She lived in the upper end of Pointe Coupee Parish and he lived about in the middle as the Mississippi River flows.  So they both lived close to the artery of the nation, the mighty Mississippi.

There was no railroad in the upper end of the parish at that time.  Indeed such a thing as highway did not exist yet.  There were no telephones, cars or trucks, no roads only horses or horse drawn vehicles like wagons or buggies.  And those days there were on tracts here and there that connected communities.  Mostly folks followed the river and if the could afford it, rode on steamboats.

So the letters present a picture of life at the turn of the century as this all occurred in the year 1901.  Everything had to be hauled in by boat, or in wagon from the town of New Roads or up the river from New Orleans.  New Roads is about three miles as the crow flies from Angeles Plantation, my grandfathers farm.  Today that is a hop, skip and jump to travel, about 5 or 6 minutes, back then it probably was a 5 or 6 mile horse ride on mostly non existent byways, across other peoples land, etc.  So everybody knew everybody and of course, there were not a lot of everybodies back then either.

And families were a big thing back then, cousins closer and often visited each other.  There was no other way besides writing a letter to communicate.  And there was no TV or even radio in those days, they were not yet invented.  So you went to see people and stayed awhile to learn all the news, who got married, who was sick, etc.  We do not visit as much nowdays, we use the cell phone and talk to them, or we go to the movie or shopping.  How society has changed.

It was a fascinating task to retranscribe the letters again and now they are in the computer's memory and have been shared to relatives in California and Colorado with the push of a button.  Soon they will be on a CD-ROM.  And when I get the rest of the letters, I will transcribe them too and put in a foreword and perhaps have them copyrighted for it is intellectual family property.  They could make a fascinating book, another Gone with the Wind perhaps.