The letter from America was once a big part of Christmas

As the importance of letters and letter-writing fades from view, in the face of electronic communications, it can be difficult to imagine the anticipation that receiving a letter once held. At a time when countless people left the Ox Mountain region for a better life in America, the letter home was often the only link that existed between separated loved ones.

While such communications were confined to those who could write, these letters contained stories of success and failure, love and heartbreak, births, marriages and deaths. These letters home, often received in time for Christmas, sometimes contained American dollars, an essential lifeline for poor people at home.

One million letters 

The massive numbers of Irish who emigrated to the New World created an almighty tonnage of mail. Letters were the only real form of communication at the time. A hunger for news from home sought by those who were away, coupled with a hunger for financial support needed by those at home, meant that huge volumes of mail travelled both ways. Mayo.ie, in a blog, Letters in Ireland, gives some idea of the magnitude of letter-writing in the nineteenth century.

It is estimated that one million letters were sent to America from Ireland in 1854 alone. On its maiden voyage, the Titanic collected 1,385 bags of letters at Cobh which were destined for America. Letters home were often accompanied by remittances or other items such as tickets, clothes or photos. It has been calculated that €260 millon was sent home to Ireland in the nineteenth century.

The letters mainly discussed family and friends but also provided an insight into the emigrant’s reflections on their new life. Some accounts were exaggerated while others were brutally realistic. Although most of these letters are long gone, some were kept by families and the descendants of those who wrote them. 

A project at the University of Galway has recently been set up to preserve a considerable amount of these letters. The project sprang from letters collected by US academic, Kerby Miller. Over 40 years ago, Miller issued an appeal for such letters that he felt may have been kept by loved ones, and he was right. He received thousands of replies containing what amounted to a massive social history. 

The countless letters he later transcribed are now preserved in the Imirce Collection, an online searchable archive containing the stories of Irish emigrants going back over the centuries. An RTÉ 1 radio documentary, A Letter Home, explores the new archive and meets the people working on it. In the documentary you can also hear the letters read and the stories they contain; stories of work and life, sadness and longing, travel and adventure.

Success and failure 

One letter in the Imirce Collection, with a Sligo connection, highlights the fact that before the Famine, it was mostly the educated and the relatively well-to-do who made the trip to America and subsequently wrote letters home. The letter is described below and while it gives an account of separation, it seems it is a separation that can be easily restored.

Thomas Gunning, New York City, to Major Charles O'Hara, Collooney, County Sligo, 26 August 1831. 

Gunning's letters to Major O'Hara, who may be his former landlord, are friendly and not overly obsequious; he sends money to his relatives via O'Hara. In this relatively short letter, Gunning sends £3 to O'Hara for Scanlan, who has been taking care of his young son, whom he and his wife, Kitty, had left in County Sligo when they emigrated. Gunning also laments the death of his wife, near New Orleans, on 11 September 1830, on their return from Texas. He has now returned to New York City, where he is working as a merchant's clerk for £3 a month "and found". He plans to pay for the passages of his son and for one of his brothers in May 1832.

At the time of the Famine, and in the years afterwards, the Irish travelled to America in their droves. These people were often not well educated and had little or no means. Letters written at this time often paint pictures of shocking hardship and utter desperation.

In a piece written by Matt Keogh for Irish Central in recent weeks, under the heading, Inspiring Emigrant Letters Home to Ireland from America in the Famine Era, he mentions a particular letter, also with a Sligo connection, that highlights the plight of the poor at the time. The letter writing is skillful, even if the story is harrowing. The following is an excerpt from the letter from Michael and Mary Rush from Ardnaglass, Co Sligo who are writing to their father, Thomas, in Carillon, Ontario in September 1846.

Pen cannot dictate the poverty of this country at present, the potato crop is quite done away all over Ireland. There is nothing expected here, only an immediate famine. If you knew what danger we and our fellow countrymen are suffering, you would take us out of this poverty Isle. We can only say the curse of God fell down on Ireland in taking away the potatoes, they being the only support of the people. Not like countries that have a supply of wheat and other grain.

So, dear father, if you don’t endeavour to take us out of it, it will be the first news you will hear by some friend of me and my little family to be lost by hunger, and there are thousands dread they will share the same fate.

Henry Gavigan, formerly from the Ox Mountains and then living in New York, refers to the death of his mother and the recent Wall Street Crash in a letter, written to a friend at home in December 1929.

Many things made me glad on my visit to Erin. Many things made me sad. Inseparable with my home-going was the thought that the one I loved on earth the most would not be there and will not be there anymore.

We had a financial earthquake here during the past month due to the violent drop in stock values. The trouble was not with American values but with 20,000,000 gamblers frightened all at once and throwing their stocks overboard.

Social history 

Today, these letters provide us with a window into the past. Some of them were written to send joyful news of the births of a new Irish American generation that would never experience poverty again. Others were written in despair by people who longed for loved ones. This mass emigration, sometimes of whole families, left mothers and fathers at home, bereft. Parents at that time, while poor, were no less loving than the parents of today and saying goodbye forever to their living children was a devastation beyond our imagination.

Think back to the last time you received a hand-written letter from a family member. I would venture to say it was quite a while ago. While we have every imaginable way of communicating with each other today, little of it involves the craft or the skill of letter writing. 

As for creating a social history for the future, there simply will not be a lasting record. There will be no story, no written account, no news of success, no lines of regret, no photograph, no tear-stained page. We will never dig a social history out of the rushed emails and poorly spelled text messages of today. We might find it somewhere else, but we will no longer find it in old hand-written letter.