Discovering the letters

One of the greatest thrills of my family history researches was finding in the Nottinghamshire Archives Office the typed transcripts of seven letters received by Joseph H Cree of New York State from 1844 to 1863. I was at once able to identify Joseph as the grandson of James Cree, a carpenter of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.

The letters were known to Joseph's descendants in America at least as early as 1964 when his great-granddaughter Inez Snell referred to them as, "old letters found in a chest..."

Ed Leavitt wrote, "My mother Helen Hodsdon Leavitt had the original Cree letters in an old spool thread cabinet for thirty years. I believe it was my dad, who was interested in genealogy, who realized the full import of these letters and gave them to Ellen for her graduate work."

This was Ellen Lawson (then Ellen Henle) of Cleveland, Ohio, a great-great-granddaughter of Joseph and his wife Martha. She transcribed the letters as part of her doctoral work and had arranged for her typescripts to be deposited in Manchester Public Library who then sent photocopies to Nottingham Archives. I am eternally grateful to Ellen for making those first transcriptions of the letters available in that way, as I would probably never have known about them otherwise.

I wrote to Ellen and she put me in touch with her mother Ruth Langenheim of Falmouth, Massachusetts, who by then had care of the original manuscript letters.

In 1989 I spoke to Ruth on the phone. She told me that she remembered her grandmother whom she referred to as Mary Martha telling her that she, Mary, remembered sailing from England in a sailing ship at the age of five. Apparently Mary had very few memories of England but one thing she did remember was helping in a dairy. Mary was one of children that Joseph and Martha Cree had taken on that momentous journey in 1843.

I was amazed to hear this story being told to me, 147 years after the event, at only second hand. Mary must have been in her seventies at least when she told Ruth as a little girl about the migration, since Ruth was only six when her grandmother died. And now Ruth in her seventies was telling me the story.

When, later, I suggested publishing the letters, Ruth, an "active retired journalist" herself, gave me her enthusiastic support and encouragement. She also sent me a further typescript of a letter, the only one written by Joseph H Cree himself.

Using parish registers and census records I researched Joseph Cree's family and tried to identify all of the people and places mentioned in the letters. A number of queries about the transcription arose and, in 1991, at my request, Ruth very kindly had the originals photocopied. She sent me copies of all except nos. 4, 8 and 10. The letters as published here have been newly transcribed from those facsimile copies.

Ed Leavitt of Peioria, Illinois, who is Ruth's nephew and also a descendant of Joe and Martha, visited Diana and me in Oadby in 1990, and went to Swanwick to see for himself the place his ancestors had left. He did further research while in the area and kindly passed on to me what he had found. I am grateful to Ed for his continuing support of this research over several years, for sending facsimile copies of three of the letters (nos. 4, 8 and 10) and for letting me have details of the Hodsdon family tree.

I have facsimile copies of the letters that Ruth Langenhein had made in 1991 and I believe another set is now in the possession of Ed Leavitt. The present whereabouts of the originals seems uncertain. Ellen Lawson has said that she had them deposited in the Manchester Public Library and her typescript copies in Nottinghamshire Archives Office. But both these organisations say they have only typescript copies. The Nottinghamshire ones are clearly photocopies of the Manchester ones as they bear the Manchester Public Libraries stamp. Ed Leavitt wrote in 1996 that Ruth Langenheim still had the originals in February 1991.

In transcribing from the facsimile letters I have kept to the spellings of the originals, adding modern versions in square brackets where the meaning might otherwise be unclear. Punctuation and paragraphs are almost non-existent in the originals and I have added these (including capitalisation) to aid reading. I have placed explanations of the context, especially referring to place names and personal names, in the right-hand column.

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