ABSTRACT
The Jane Trattles letters are among the most interesting in this collection, and are presented here and in the next volume. Written mainly from Niles, Berrien County, Michigan – by various members of the family, but mostly by the mother, Jane – they cover a long period of adjustment and ultimately success. By the 1860s Jane’s children want to hire labourers to do the farm work. Jane is getting old, is not very healthy, though she will survive for several years to come. Their Methodist faith sustains them, and clearly they have an extensive network of other immigrants in America to use if they want. The letter of 25 May 1857 reveals that they have a ‘good English Docter he is a London Collage educated Man’, and that Jane is now 64 years old. Her sons include an engineer who is doing well, and another with 800 acres in Ottawa County, where she travels to see him, and she records that the area is ‘filling up very fast with settlers moastley Dutch’. She also refers to the fact that they have ‘a new president elected and in hoapes he will do good in the country’, though unfortunately this was President Buchanan. Interestingly, Jane remarks that ‘if I was to come to England I should seem as a stranger and moast of people strangers to me’, an indication of her complete assimilation, and American differences. Also significant is her membership in Niles Methodist Church, where ‘we have good Preaching and Class meets every Sabbath I meet many kinde friends there some of them English’, another reference to the important social contacts and links with fellow immigrants that came with shared English and American denominations.
