by Stephanie Curry’s diary on archival hunting and one weekend entirely lost to somebody else’s correspondence
I went to the estate sale for furniture, genuinely, a specific chair I’d seen photographed online, and left three hours later having abandoned the chair entirely in favour of two full boxes of water-stained 1700s family correspondence that the estate had apparently no idea what to do with and priced accordingly, almost nothing.
What the Letters Actually Contained
Ordinary family business mostly, accounts, small disputes, weather complaints, the genuinely mundane texture of eighteenth-century domestic life that rarely survives this intact or this personal, since most preserved colonial correspondence tends toward the formal or the politically significant rather than this kind of everyday, unguarded detail.
How My Weekend Actually Disappeared
I meant to sort through them briefly Saturday morning and instead read letter after letter well into Sunday evening, genuinely absorbed in a family’s ordinary concerns from nearly three centuries ago, missing errands, missing a planned dinner with friends, entirely lost inside someone else’s long-finished domestic drama.
The Specific Letter That Stopped Me Cold
One, dated during a documented regional crisis, described the actual lived experience of that period with a specificity no textbook account ever quite manages, fear rendered in genuinely ordinary, human language rather than the abstracted summary historians usually have available to work with.
Why This Kind of Find Matters So Much
Official records tell you what happened. Letters like these tell you how it actually felt, and that distinction matters enormously for anyone trying to genuinely understand a period rather than simply catalogue its major events. I don’t get finds like this often, genuine, intact, personal correspondence surviving in this condition.
Where the Letters Are Going Now
I’m working with a proper archive to ensure they’re preserved correctly rather than simply sitting in a box in my own home, though I confess I’ve kept photographed copies for my own ongoing reading, since I suspect I’m not remotely finished with them yet. Further diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original piece live at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/
