OLD LYME, CT.- The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, recently launched a new addition to its website, FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org. This online resource uses letters to Captain Robert Harper Griswold from his wife Helen as a window to the past, revealing how people communicated with one another when one was away at sea. The postal process is unique to the age and reminds us that people were not always a text or tweet away from a loved one.

A selection of the letters is on display through September 20 as part of the Museum’s current exhibition All the Sea Knows: Marine Art from the Museum of the City of New York. Portraits of the boats that took Robert away from his family as a captain for the Black X Line of packet ships appear in the exhibition. Museum Curator Amy Kurtz Lansing and Director of Education and Outreach David D.J. Rau developed the content for the website so that the information could remain a resource and be added to long after the exhibition is over. “Visitors to the All the Sea Knows are drawn to the letters,” notes Kurtz Lansing. “They are heartfelt and human demonstrations of the difficulties of living apart, from worries over health and safety to who was going to do the shopping.” “We wanted to make this online learning resource meaningful beyond the exhibition. The letters represent a connection to the larger world in which Lyme families played a part and issues of transatlantic communication, while providing insight into the experiences of seafarers.”

For the Dear Dear Husband website the letters were scanned in high-resolution, allowing viewers a close inspection of the written words. Although beautiful, handwriting of the 19th century can be difficult to discern. Each of the letters has been transcribed for easier reading with illustrated annotations that help the reader understand the content, personalities, and context.

Over the course of 11 years, Florence Griswold’s mother Helen Powers in Lyme wrote to her husband Robert while he was away at sea as the captain of ships that sailed regularly between New York and London. Ranging from courtship correspondence, to the trials and tribulations of early marriage apart, to the issues of raising a family together long-distance, these letters give an intimate view of life within a seafaring family. The letters are of interest to a variety of audiences, including lovers of Connecticut history, women’s history, postal history and maritime enthusiasts, and teachers and students of American social history. Rau, states, “the Museum views these letters as crucial to our on-going understanding of the Museum’s core story and is thrilled to share them with the public.”

In 1938, a year after Miss Florence’s death, an auction of her personal belongings was held on the side lawn of the Griswold House. The advertisement for the auction listed a “box of old letters, papers, numismatics, books…” as well as “paintings, old jewelry, old flat silver.” It can be presumed that some of the “old letters,” were the heirloom correspondence between Florence’s parents, the intimate back-and-forth conversations between a seafaring husband and young wife, surviving alone at home. Some of the letters have found their way back to the Museum. Eighteen letters were donated to the Museum by David H. Littlefield, and a second cache, which have been scanned and transcribed for the first time—were collected by Robert Lorenz, a specialist in postal history. The transcriptions and many of the annotations are by Carolyn Wakeman, the Museum’s archives researcher and author of the History Blog. Dear Dear Husband was made possible through a grant from Connecticut Humanities.