I had put together a spreadsheet of the empty envelopes and I decided to add to that and compile a full overview of the letters we know were in the family at one time.
I looked over the correspondence I have between Vera (Healey) Braden and the various staff at the Indiana Historical Society. I re-discovered a news article from 1936 that talks about the letters. And I looked at the letters we still have.
I still need to go through the letters that we have only as copies provided by the Indiana Historical Society. I will report again once I finish the spread sheet.
But I think I have come up with a logical "story" of the Braden letters. This is based on facts, but has a number of deductions and suppositions. So here is my proposed Braden Letters Story:
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| The Address Sheet of one of the early Braden letters |
Most of the earliest letters are either written TO Deborah (Young) Jenners or BY her daughter, Nancy (Jenners) Jennings. Deborah died in 1842 and Nancy in 1844. Mary's other sister, Sarah, died in 1846. The other early letters were written TO Mary (Jenners) Braden or a few to her husband, Burr Braden.
I believe that after the death of her mother and sisters, Mary (Jenners) Braden, came into possession of the letters that had be written to her mother and her sister, Nancy. Many of the letters TO Nancy were probably FROM Elizabeth (Braden) Hixon, based on the letters that we have that were written BY Nancy.
Sometime in the 1850s, Elizabeth (Braden) Hixon's daughter, Betty (Hixon) Fenton, visited Burr and Mary Braden at their home in Jefferson, Indiana. I believe that at that time, Mary Braden gave Betty the letters her mother, Elizabeth, had written to Mary's sister, Nancy. And Betty gave Mary the letters Nancy had written to Elizabeth. That would explain why the Braden letters our family had were the ones Nancy had WRITTEN not the ones she had RECEIVED.
The next significant group of letters were written BY Robert F. Braden TO his parents, Burr and Mary Braden, and family while he was serving in the military during the Civil War. Burr died while Robert was in the service. Mary kept her son's letters. Mary died before Robert was discharged.
After Burr and Mary died, their son, William M. Braden, took over the family farm and homestead. The letters apparently remained in the old home. William married Laura Watt and they had three children: Mary Jane, Robert F., and Alba E. Braden.
A large number of the letters were written by relatives of Laura (Watt) Braden TO her, so Laura apparently saved her letters, too. The family continued to live in the old home and both William and Laura died there. So, I suspect, the letters remained there until after Laura's death.
William and Laura's son, Robert F., took over running the family farm and eventually married, though he had no children. Their daughter, Mary Jane, never married. Their son, Alba, married Emily Crane and had two children, William Robert and Laura Nancy. I will do blog posts on all these people, but for now, I want to think about the letters.
Another significant group of the letters are written to Mary Jane Braden. She was a letter-saver, too.
Sometime after her parents died, Mary Jane Braden moved from the family farm to a house in Frankfort, Indiana. She lived there until her death in 1932. Her obituary mentions that she kept numerous scrapbooks that "would be of interest to any library." I've never seen these scrapbooks.
Both Alba and his wife Emily died while their children were young. The children's uncle and aunt, Robert and Mary Jane Braden, became their guardians.
Here is what I believe happened next. When Mary Jane moved into Frankfort, she took the letters with her. She put them into a scrapbook. Or maybe more than one scrapbook. Some of the envelopes still have signs of glue on them from being pasted into a scrapbook. The 1936 news article I have about the letters mentions that they are in a scrapbook. The correspondence with the Indiana Historical Society mentions removing them from a scrapbook.
When Mary Jane died in 1932, her heirs were her nephew and niece, William R. and Laura N. Braden. My husband's mother remembers her mother, Vera (Healey) Braden, and her aunt, Laura (Braden) Pavey, cleaning out Mary Jane's house. It seems likely that Vera came into possession of the scrapbooks with the letters at that time.
In her correspondence about the letters, Vera says (in 1963) that "for 31 years I have had letters on the Civil War, written by Major Robert Braden..." So, she got them in 1932 which is when Mary Jane Braden died.
In 1964, Vera allowed the Indiana Historical Society to publish her transcriptions of some of the Civil War letters. Then in 1969, Vera allowed the Indiana Historical Society to make copies of all the letters still in her possession. They were removed from the scrapbook(s) at that time for copying. The letters were returned to Vera laid flat in folders.
Sometime after the 1969 copying, all the Civil War letters and most of the letters written before the Civil War left Vera's possession. We don't know for sure what happened to them. My mother-in-law says Vera sold them to a collector, but I have no documentation.
I know one of the oldest letters, from Martin Jenners to his mother, Deborah, written in 1826 is now in the possession of a library in Florida, given to them by a collector.
I suspect that the letters Betty (Hixon) Fenton got from Mary (Jenners) Braden when she visited in the 1850s are the documents that went up for sale in an estate sale in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was the sale that another researcher attended and purchased a couple of the documents which she then gave to me.
The letters that remain in the family are currently in archival boxes here in my office. I plan to scan them so I can share them. I am not sure yet just how many letters there were originally; however, my spreadsheet has 517 items on it. The oldest is a cover sheet for a letter dated 1799 and addressed to Abiel Jenners, Washington City. This item is MISSING but the Indiana Historical Society has a copy. There are 247 empty envelopes with no letters and that the IHS does NOT have copies of. There are 86 letters that we used to have and that the IHS has copies of, but that we no longer have the originals. And there are 184 items that we still have the original. These range in date from 1826 to 1969.
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