Recently, I was able to review a digital copy of an account book kept by my ancestor’s brother in the first half of the 18th century. He was a successful businessman in Charleston, South Carolina, after immigrating from Ireland around 1800. He never married and had no known children, but had close relationships with some of his nieces and nephews. The book isn’t long, mostly, it seems he is itemizing his property, perhaps in preparation for drafting his will.

In the middle of the record are pages describing his mother’s brothers, their children, and their children’s spouses, along with small details indicating places, if they were living, and so on. All of this information was previously unknown.

While describing these findings to relatives, I was trying to put into words how I was feeling, I told them that finds like these were “like a love letter from the past.” Obviously the people who write down this sort of information have no idea that I would find their papers almost 200 years later, and they wouldn’t know that these family relationships would be lost over time and across oceans. While these papers weren’t written directly to me, I feel as if they were written for me, kept and passed down for me to find, to discover the affection this ancestor had for his relatives, a love letter across time.