‘I have a great grievance’

One of the prized documents in my own extended family is a letter from John Wolfe, in Missouri, to his brother Pat back home in Ireland. John had traveled to America with his brother Richard in search of yet another brother. James Wolfe had immigrated more than a dozen years earlier when suddenly his updates stopped coming. So the brothers went in search of him. What they discovered was heartbreaking, and the letter, which had addressed Pat exclusively, suddenly brings in the whole family:

Dear uncle Brother Patt father Tim Harnett John forde I have a great grievance to Let you know Our Brother James Died In the State of mississippa the first year He went to natches the fine Learned Man There is nothing [grieves] Richard [and] I more than to Say that we Cant See hear of find our Brother alive on his Estate after the Stroke we made in going to hime five thousand miles from home …

The letter makes for very compelling reading … if, that is, you can actually read it. The copy I have in my files appears to be a photocopy of the original, or perhaps even a photocopy of a photocopy. The handwriting is difficult to decipher, the sentences often unpunctuated and ungrammatical. This is where a proper transcription plays a crucial role—not just in reading the letter, but in understanding it, as well.

I recently completed what is the third transcription that I know of. The first was made in 1939 after the letter was discovered in a family member’s attic in Ireland. A relative through the brothers’ mother, J. D. Harnett, working from the original but with limited knowledge of the American context in which the brothers traveled, created a transcript for a article that appeared in the Limerick Leader newspaper. The second was completed by Sr. Berchmans Murphy, an Irish nun whose brother-in-law was a family historian.

There are more question marks in my version. In an effort to make clean copy, I believe the previous transcriptions made assumptions when the text was unclear. Where I didn’t think those assumptions were warranted by what I could see with my own eyes, I indicated. I also tried to annotate the text with background information.

This is all part of the genealogical and family history project—using all the information we have available to make sense of an otherwise foggy past. But also admitting to those occasions where we just don’t know.

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