My daughters live in Stockholm, Sweden and Boulder, Colorado now. We generally talk once or twice a week via phone or video chat. I often think about earlier times in history when there were no long-distance options beyond letters. Throughout much of history, even letters would have been few and far between due to the cost of postage, the low rate of literacy, and the time it took for postal delivery.

My grandfather on my mother’s side left England aboard the Coronia* in 1906 with his son, Ernie. His first wife and younger son followed on a slightly later ship.  As far as I know, he never returned. I know nothing of his background, and all who would have are gone. Like many immigrants, I imagine he left family, but there are no records of his communication with anyone there. I often think about how hard it must’ve been for those he left behind.

Even in my one lifetime, when I studied abroad, I never spoke to my family during the entire year. Overseas calls in those days were not affordable. The best I could do was borrow a friend’s tape recorder to send a few holiday trinkets home along with a message and song I wrote and recorded for Christmas.

The Smithsonian Magazine recently published an article about a trove of letters found that date from the Seven Years’ War. The letters were written by common citizens to their loved ones aboard the ship Galatée. They never reached their intended recipients, because the ship was captured. The letters were stored, to be unearthed two centuries later, by Renaud Morieux, a historian at Cambridge University.

He points out that the letters offer a unique perspective into the lives of everyday people, especially  women, who faced by the challenges and uncertainty of war, and the absence of loved ones.

I am eternally grateful to have so many options now with which to communicate with my daughters and other family members, all of whom live more than 350 miles away. The tradeoff in the loss of letter writing, though, is that it’s unlikely that any of our communications—unless we are celebrities or politicians–will ever be preserved for posterity.
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P.S. *If you have relatives who came through Ellis Island, you can go to Ellis Island Foundation‘s database for free, to discover information about their passage.

Originally published in BeyondtheNest.com, Rochester’s FREE weekly guide to arts, culture and recreation.