My Irish Sweetheart - Love letters from 1928

Untitled Part 1

Life in the 1920’s was an entirely different world from the one that we know today. Very few people were fortunate enough to own an automobile, and relied on trains, trolley cars and horse and buggy as a means of transportation.  There were no Smart phones or Ipads,  Facebook or Instagrams. In the 1920s, the main source of communication was writing letters – already becoming obsolete with the new technologies on the rise.

When my father passed away in 2013, I was helping my mother go through some of my father’s belonging. My brother Walt, the only one in the family who was a stamp collector, was to receive my father’s collection. There were boxes and boxes of stamps and envelopes. As I helped my mother sort through them, we came upon a box of old love letters that had yellowed and aged through the decades, clearly over one hundred of them. I cannot express my excitement at finding them. When I asked my mother what she knew of them, she could not remember when or where they had come from, only that someone had given them to my father.

There was no organization to the letters. I leafed through them and randomly began reading them. To my surprise, they were love letters between a young couple, Ethel and Guss “Raymond,” who lived in Washington DC in 1928, and had been separated when Guss moved to Hagerstown to install plumbing in a new hotel.

I was even more thrilled when my mother told me that I could have the letters. I carefully boxed them up and placed them in my carry-on bag. While sitting at the Melbourne Airport, I began reading them, and continued on the plane ride to BWI. I was intrigued by their daily lives, their jobs, the theatre and shows that they attended, the gifts that they bought for Christmas. They spoke of many people: Mabel, Edna, Bernie, Bob, Raymond, Marie, Gertrude, and many others – all of whom I knew nothing about, not even their relationship to Ethel and Guss.

When I arrived home, with my busy schedule, the letters were set aside, and the lives of the young lovers were forgotten for a short while. A year later, I was searching on Ancestry.com for connections to my own family history, and I suddenly remembered the letters. To my surprise, I found Ethel and Guss in the Census Records, along with several of the people that they had spoken of.  Many of them were family members.

It was time to tell their story. I began typing the letters into my computer and arranging them chronologically. Their letters alone were filled with the passion of young love.  But I wanted to know more. I continued my research into their family genealogy, and I also googled several of the places and events that they had spoken of.  Soon, more and more discoveries came to light.

One of the fascinating things that I unearthed while searching through pages of records, was that in 1950 Ethel and Guss boarded the luxury cruise liner, “Queen of Bermuda,” and left Bermuda, bound for New York City.