Old Letters: Treasures and Mysteries

One of the things that has helped bring life to my research is the fact that we have in our possession a number of old family letters.  They are truly a treasure.

As I write biographies of family members, I will quote from these letters from time to time.

Here is what we know and can guess about the history of our family letters.

The oldest one in our possession is dated Baltimore 29 October 1828.  It is from Martin Jenners to his mother, Deborah (Young) Jenners.   We have, perhaps, 100 or so of these old letters.

Many of the letters are one half of the correspondence between Ann "Nancy" Jenners in Indiana and Elizabeth Wright Braden in Virginia.  What is particularly interesting about this is that we have the "wrong" half of the letters, those written by Ann to Elizabeth.  I suspect that at some point, the letters Elizabeth wrote to Ann in Indiana were given to her daughter, Bettie, and Ann's letters to Elizabeth in Virginia were given to a Jenners family member here in Indiana.

A number of years ago, I was contacted by another researcher who had purchased a couple of letters at an estate sale in Arkansas.  They related to Elizabeth Wright Braden and her husband, Fleming Hixon.  This researcher said there were many more letters and papers in the sale that she was not able to buy.  I am fairly sure that these would be the "Elizabeth" half of the correspondence between Ann Jenners & Elizabeth Braden.  She generously gave me the letters she purchased.  After a number of years of searching, I was able to trace the Hixon descendants to Arkansas.  I have not been able, yet, to determine whose estate sale it was or where the letters are now, but I keep hoping to find them eventually.  If you have them, we need to talk!

We also know that there were many more letters at one time than we still have in our possession.  In the 1960s, my husband's grandmother, Vera (Healey) Braden, loaned the letters to the Indiana Historical Society so they could be microfilmed.  At that time the letters included a group written by Robert F. Braden during the Civil War to his family in Indiana.  According to a family story, Vera sold the Civil War letters to a collector.  The fate of the other missing letters is unknown.  Again, let me know if you have them!

In 1995, I contacted the Indiana Historical Society and they generously made photocopies of the letters on their microfilm that we no longer have.  From the originals in our possession and the photocopies of the microfilm, I transcribed the letters and created a booklet, "Letters and Papers of the Braden and Jenners Families, August 24, 1794 to August 8, 1969."  Copies of this book were donated to the Indiana Historical Society; the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia; the Clinton Co. Public Library in Frankfort, Indiana; and the Tippecanoe Co. Historical Society in Lafayette, Indiana.