I have a project. To be honest, I have many projects, but this one seems special. Overwhelming, but special.
In 1942, my great-grandmother received a letter. By 1946, she’d received many letters from that correspondent, as had her daughters, my aunts Edith and Lillian.
The correspondent was my grandfather, Herbert Martin Garniss, and covered his years serving with the Royal Canadian Engineers in the European theatre.
Aunt Edith kept many documents related to her family. She never married and had time, space, and inclination to collect and store documents as each of her parents and siblings passed away. She instilled a love of history in me by sharing tidbits of family history, telling me about real people doing real things.
Aunt Edith was the last of her generation to die. With no children, clearing out her home fell to the nieces and nephews, and those nieces and nephews were only too pleased to pass along all the family history papers and the stacks of family photos to me.
It’s overwhelming to go through a century of accumulated history. History that sits within the great moments of the 20th century, but also is mostly disconnected from those moments, dealing as it does with the personal. I found my great-uncle’s train engineer tests and certifications - connected with a time in Canadian history when the train was the primary mode of travelling significant distance. I found my aunt’s grade school essays - written in an era of one-room schoolhouses. I found the original deed to the farm my family still owns - from a time when Britain encouraged settlement and colonization of a pre-Confederation Canada.
And I found a box of my grandfather’s letters. 6 years of letters, in a strong and confident hand that had been lost to palsy by the time I was born. Letters with a cheeky sense of humour that never disappeared until he died when I was 18. Letters providing advice to his siblings and mother from an ocean away and letters describing the war from the bottom up, from a man who volunteered “because it seemed like the right thing to do”, according to his military intake papers. But in reading his letters, he volunteers so his brothers wouldn’t. He volunteered to make sure his sister, the nurse, stayed home. He volunteered to make sure there was a steady stream of cash at home, and he volunteered because it was the right thing to do.
And thus my project - transcribe the letters into a document and have them bound into a book for my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and anyone else who is interested. At that point, I’ll donate the letters themselves to the Huron County museum, where my grandfather lived for his entire life, excluding a brief sojourn in Europe, or the national military archives.
It’s a challenging project, deciphering fading letters that are over 80 years old. It’s an interesting project, reading my grandfather’s instructions to his brother Ed on how to talk to the draft so he could stay home and farm their Uncle Will’s property. It’s an insightful project, seeing how distance meant sharing gossip simply took more time. But I do believe it is a valuable project, not just for my family, but for everyone who is living in these uncertain times.
And so, one day, there will be a book that begins:
Dear Mother -
Well, we have had a real wet day here all day, so had not a great deal to do. We were supposed to go on a route march this morning, but just went to the gym instead. Got the old kinks taken out. This afternoon I pressed my coat and tunic, and layed around. About 4 o’clock the sarg came for help to set up chairs for church but when we got there it was already done.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
angrboda
