When my mother passed, my younger brother inherited the task of cleaning out her townhouse and settling her estate.  Sometime long after the funeral, Tom visited us and left an old suitcase that once belonged to our mother.  

I eventually opened the suitcase to find a large bundle of letters, all neatly bound with a faded pink ribbon.  Working my way through these letters, I determined that all were written by my mother to my dad during WWII.  Watson was stationed overseas with the Canadian Army while my mom spent the war working in a grocery store and raising my older brother and me. 

In a small mining town, there was not much in the way of exciting news, so Betty writes about her two boys, their daily activities, fights, adventures, and achievements.   I hastened to transcribe all these letters for the rest of our family, explaining the many references to friends, family, neighbors, and locations as best I could.  I also included the war timeline. 

In all, there were 160 letters, all from my mom to my father.  No letters from my father in return, yet in many of the letters, there were references to letters received by my mother. Interestingly, she also sent him money?  I thought that was a bit strange since he would have been earning a soldier’s wage.   My older brother purchased war stamps regularly to help support the war effort.  Some of his early drawings and notes survived.  Lots of short commentary on friends, relatives, and neighbors.  In one letter, the Italians have surrendered which marked a major moment in the timeline of the war.

No letters from Watson to Betty survived.  But now, our family has the most amazing insights into our early wartime lives.  I have gained images and revelations of my early life before I achieved sentience, a story that few have been offered. 

All the original letters have been saved in acid-free sleeves and stored in my safe.  Some of the letters were the small, thin, flimsy envelopes you could write on, fold, and mail.  I believe these were called aerograms to save weight and bulk for the large amount of wartime mail.  The transcripts have been shared broadly throughout our family. 

Ron Gilmore

Email:    rvg3@me.com

Website:       https://rgenealogy.ca