American Letters: The Envelope That Held Families Together

Pick up any serious history of the Irish in America and you will find it stitched together from one kind of source above all others: the letters. For Irish emigrants and the families who stayed behind, the envelope was the relationship. Not a symbol of it, the thing itself. There was no telephone, no cheap passage home, no realistic hope of standing in the same kitchen again, and so everything a family still was, once the ship had sailed, had to fit on a few sheets of paper. The American letters, as whole townlands came to call the post that crossed the sea, held together families that distance should have dissolved.

The thread ran both ways

News went out of Ireland: who had married, who had died, how the harvest came in, what the landlord said, which neighbour’s son would be next to sail. And back from America came the other half of the correspondence, the half Irish memory prizes most, the American letter, the envelope from New York or Boston carried up the boreen at a run. Accounts from the west of Ireland describe the same scene over and over: the letter opened carefully, read aloud at the fire because not everyone could read, handed around to neighbours, then kept for years in the dresser. A letter was a public event in a townland and a private lifeline in a kitchen, both at once.

Neither direction was worth much without the other. The emigrant needed word of home as badly as home needed word of the emigrant, and the whole fragile system depended on someone, at each end, sitting down at a table and writing.

Not everyone could. Accounts of the period describe letters written out for their senders by a literate son or daughter, a schoolmaster, sometimes the priest, and a reply composed the same way at the far end, so that a single sheet might pass through four sets of hands before its news was done travelling. As the national schools spread through the second half of the century, more of the writing came home to the family itself.

What the American letters carried

Money, first and bluntly. Folded notes at the start, then money orders, what the townlands simply called American money. The historian Arnold Schrier put the flow of it at more than 260 million dollars sent home between the Famine and 1900, an almost unimaginable transfusion into small-farm Ireland. By the estimates built on that work, well over a third of it in the later decades came not as cash but as prepaid passage tickets, and American money paid for roughly three quarters of all Irish emigration in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sister brought out the brother, the brother a cousin, ticket by ticket, letter by letter. If your family left Ireland in stages, a chain of envelopes almost certainly organised it, and the story of the American money is big enough to deserve its own telling.

But the letters carried everything the money could not say. In the letters this site follows, the first American money reaches Ballycastle in August 1850, a few dollars folded into paper, and the paper matters more than the dollars. It is proof, nearly three years after a famine-year sailing, that the family still holds.

What it cost to keep a family on paper

The mechanics are worth knowing, because they set the rhythm of every emigrant correspondence. From 1840 the United Kingdom, which then included all of Ireland, had the uniform penny post and the world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black. The stamps on Irish mail were British stamps, and they stayed British until 1922. This project is careful about that plain fact, because the people these letters are written for would catch the error at a glance.

The Atlantic was another matter. Under the first postal convention between Britain and the United States, agreed in December 1848 and in force early in 1849, a half-ounce transatlantic letter cost a shilling from the Irish side, twenty-four cents from the American. That was serious money in a cabin economy, which is one reason the earliest famine letters often travelled by hand instead, entrusted to a neighbour bound for the port in the hope they might find a ship. The first letter in this series is sent exactly that way, and you can see Brigid’s 1847 letter for what that looks like on the page.

Cunard’s mail steamers had been crossing since 1840, and steam and later treaties made the post steadily faster and cheaper as the century wore on. From July 1866 the transatlantic telegraph cable could put a headline across the ocean in a day. But a cable was for emergencies and for the wealthy. Families lived at the pace of the mail boat, and the mail boat, month after month, was enough.

The wait, and the silences

Every letter of the period has the wait built into it. Weeks out and weeks back meant that a question asked in spring might not be answered until the hay was in. People wrote accordingly. They answered the last letter, reported the season just gone, and asked the questions whose answers they knew were months away. Small things travelled with the words as the century went on, a photograph once photographs could be had, a sprig of shamrock posted out for the seventeenth of March, and the envelope became home in miniature. It gives the surviving correspondence its particular tone, patient, deliberate, nothing wasted, and it is the tone this series works to keep.

And some letters simply stopped. Behind many an Irish family tree there is a line that goes quiet: an emigrant who moved on, or fell on times too hard to admit to, or died with no one beside them who knew where to send the news. The word used at home was “lost”, not dead, just gone beyond the reach of the post. Any honest account of emigrant letters has to include the ones that never came, because the fear of that silence is in every line of the ones that did.

Why our letters travel from Ireland outward

The envelopes Irish memory treasures came from America into Ireland, with the dollars inside. The envelope the emigrant treasured came the other way: word of home, in a hand they knew, with the townland’s whole year folded inside it. The series behind this site recreates that second kind, letters posted from Ireland to the family that left, because that was the letter worth waiting a month for. How one fictional family carries a real century, and why our letters travel from Ireland to America and never the reverse, is set out plainly on the story page.

The history in them is the history above. Book One ends with a mother who has learned to live by the post. In Book Two, the new beginnings of 1859 to 1870, her daughter Nora takes up the pen, and the correspondence settles into the long rhythm this page describes: the chain migration, the money orders, the war news from America, the cable in 1866, the ordinary seasons in between. From there the thread runs on, generation to generation, through a century of letters in eight Books, until the 1940s. The American letter is half of most Irish-American family stories. These are the other half, posted from home.