The Bride of the Sea

2014 is the centenary of World War I, and as such, I have been working on a big (long) project of transcribing the letters that were sent to Nan from the trenches, and composing a book of them to keep, using au.blurb.com .To this purpose, I was going to collate it all and then put the idea out to all of you, so that you could have copies of the book printed too, if you so chose. This is still the focus of the project, but it did occur to me that I could share the letters and stories with you as I go, by creating this blog.

I have transcribed about 35 letters thus far, and there are probably about 15 to go. It is a fiddly, time consuming, totally fascinating job. The letters are not in any particular order yet, and there are other letters from before, or outside of the war and a couple from Poppy from World War II, but I will begin posting some of the transcriptions to give you a taste. We will be scanning all of the originals too and I will include these over the next little while.

Most of the letters are from Don Anderson (Nan's future husband, and our great grandfather), Charles (Charlie) Anderson, Tom Anderson, and a few others. The letters are always one solid block of text, eschewing paragraphs, and sometimes ignoring every rule of punctuation, not even bothering about full stops. I didn't know what to do with spelling errors and the like, whether to leave them in and write (sic), or leave them as is, or fix them and write an editorial explanation. There is a range of all three in the transcriptions as they stand,mans perhaps you can give me your opinions on how I should edit them for the book.

I want to write mostly about the letters, and the interesting task of transcribing them, but I will try to throw in pieces of family history as well, so that those who have no background, can find context. These are stories that belong to all of us, though Nan (Colina) left the letters to mum, where they have lived all these many years in the sea chest which arrived from England (the families were Scottish) with Sarah Gillies Cameron on The Bride of the Sea in 1845. The ship disembarked right here in Geelong, and it carried 2 of our great great great grandmothers (for my generation, but add another great for our children), Sarah Cameron and Lucy Guthrie, as well as a few other family members. These were Nan's maternal and paternal grandmothers. The rough family tree below was drawn up by my brother Grant, in direct consultation with Nan.

I hope that you can magnify this to see it clearly, photography is not my strong suite. The tree doesn't mention Josh, Xave or Sam and precedes broad knowledge of Jim, but Grant was mostly focusing on historical knowledge, and I include this so that you will be able to see who the letters are from, and where they fit in. The Anderson property was across the road from "Bushies", on Stanhope Road, outside Rushworth, and all of the letters are addressed to Colina Cameron at Stanhope Road, Rushworth.

I hope that you find these letters as interesting as I do, and share them with your children. They are such an amazing resource, and one that most families cannot lay claim to. Please get in touch if you have any questions about the project.

Love

Dani