Letters to Bertha

I re-discovered this family treasure today, when I cleared out a cabinet next to my mother’s bed. The care bed was too big to fit in the niche of her old bed, and even a smaller model (to be delivered tomorrow) needs extra space. So I had to take away that one piece of furniture, which was filled to the brim with an odd mixture of treasure, memorabilia, and junk. 

The almost a hundred letters date from 1879 to 1885. They were written by my great grandfather to his then fiancée Bertha, my great grandmother. As beautiful as the old handwriting in Sütterlin (or German cursive) may look, it’s almost impossible to decipher. 

I made it a project once, transcribing the letters to find out more about my family at the time, but gave up when the effort revealed a somewhat unflattering picture of my great grandfather. He’s always complaining about her not writing back quickly and frequently enough, and then writes at length about people he had met (or was planning to meet), whom he hopes to befriend because they might help his career as a lawyer. He asks about her friends, too; but obviously he hasn’t kept her answering letters, so one half of the picture is missing. His parents or younger siblings (of which he had 10) never get mentioned, so I gave up trying to read the letters at some point.