The Jollyman Letters: project progress October 2016

The first stage in creating the Jollyman Letters books was getting organised. These amazing family history letters were found in boxes in our attic, many with their envelopes but in no particular order.

Over the years, family members have pulled out the odd letter here and there to decipher the writing, but the scale of this project is so enormous that the task of simply reading them all has always defeated us.

I now have an entire filing cabinet devoted to the antique letters, and another cupboard for all the assorted family artefacts, plus several boxes of photographs.

The letters are all labelled with the date they were written and who to/from, then arranged in date order under their various categories, separating the Hansford letters, Millman letters, Jollyman letters etc., with extra folders for family trees, oddments such as the Cornock letters and a few letters about family history.

I have a copy of the Jollyman family tree, and I’ve started drawing up family trees for the Hansford, Millman and Cornock families. The next step will be to research, confirm and expand the information on the family trees (while thanking my lucky stars I don’t have relatives called Smith or Jones).

Some of the transcribing has already been done, but my partner and I have something more urgent to deal with this month: our wedding. And we won’t be taking the letters on our honeymoon!