ABSTRACT
To justify leaving home, to establish migration chains and teach those about to join them about the experience of emigration, to ask for or to provide economic resources, to attain intimacy, and to maintain emotional bonds, immigrants before the era of instant electronic communications were compelled to write letters to family and friends in their homelands, even though their literacy skills were often quite rudimentary.' The result is a vast, unique archive of the writings of obscure and ordinary people of dozens of different ethnocultural backgrounds that is especially rich for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the routinisation of transoceanic shipping facilitated the exchange of mail between Europe and North America. To be sure, not all immigrants participated in this international exchange of personal letters. Illiterates, those who had severed family ties, those with completed families, children, and women (who, even when literate, were often spoken for in correspondence by husbands, fathers, or brothers) are all under-represented among letter-writers. That is certainly not the only difficulty the letter poses. In many instances it is difficult to learn anything beyond basic biographical facts about either the letter-writers or those to whom they wrote. Only occasionally, moreover, do we have access to the letters that were sent to our letter-writers, so we are tuned in to a one-way conversation. Nor can we really account, with any degree of system, for why some individuals' letters survive, while doubtless a larger number, written by untold others, have not. Thus, whether we approach it on the level of the individual collection or the entire universe of immigrant personal correspondence, the question of representativeness remains especially problematic. Nor can we systematically test most letters for accuracy, let alone authenticity. Some letters, we know, were crafted by their authors or by subsequent editors to appear to be personal documents, when they actually were composed for use as propaganda, for or against emigration, in newspapers and pamphlets.2 And if all this were not
complication enough, most letters are rarely built upon one theme and go off in a number of different directions. It is difficult to know how to conceptualise documents with such internal diversity.
