Thanks, Suz....no marriage certificate with the information you mention. I wrote an essay which you might enjoy--or others here--in relation to the Welsh and their letters and some personal perspectives in terms of the religion my father belonged to and that I joined many years ago. I leave this with you. It won't help with the search but it may be of broader relevance.-thanking you again.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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MIGRANTS
I want to add this short essay as a sort of addendum to my comments on letter writing, my letter writing and the letter writing of pioneer-travellers because it provides some historical context particularly for me as a person with Welsh ancestry and it seems particularly relevant to my autobiography. I am indebted in my writing of this short essay which follows to a Bill Jones and his article Writing Back: Welsh Emigrants and their Correspondence in the Nineteenth Century, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, Winter 2005.
Eric Richards has remarked in relation to British and Irish people who moved to Australia in the nineteenth century that migrants were “more likely to reflect on their condition and their lives than those who stayed at home.” I’m not sure if pioneer-travellers in the Baha’i community did more reflecting on their condition and lives than those who stayed at home, but there is no question I did a sizeable amount of reflecting and I documented a portion of it in my letters, and after about 1995, in my emails. I am also inclined to think that, as the decades advance and as collections of the letters and emails of pioneer-travellers take form, they will reflect Eric Richards’ comment.
As is true of most European peoples whose histories took on an international dimension as result of nineteenth-century migrations, that emigrant letters became the largest and arguably the most important source for the mentalities, activities and attitudes of ordinary migrants. Commentators have long emphasised the importance of emigrant letters in illuminating the human and personal aspects of the experience of migration.
Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in Canada—a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and collected. A continuity of little to no significnace to the outside world or even within the Baha’i community at the time was taking place. Perhaps, in the long run it would be a continuity with some significance. Time would tell.
Alan Conway’s collection, published in 1961, The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants appeared just as my own collection was taking in its first letter. By the time H. S. Chapman’s article about letters from Welsh migrants “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club and Letters from America: Captain David Evans of Talsarnau, my own collection of letters were beginning to assume a substantial body of material for future archivists and historians, writers and analysts. I belonged to a religion within which the letter had assumed more than an insignificant proportion and those mysterious dispensations of Providence would determine whether my letters and those of other international pioneers would take on any significance. As a non-betting man I would say they will.
This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that collections of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace, although I hope what I write here contributes in a small way by conveying something of the diversity and complexity of the subject. I am only discussing somewhat impressionistically a few of the functions of the letters of pioneers and the relationships between them and certain aspects of the process of pioneering. I also want to discuss certain features of the letters as texts, examine some of their contexts and subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in which this correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are limited, though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a general and personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive and well-researched. I seek to shed light on some of the experiential aspects of emigrant letter writing and pioneer email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in which I was myself an international pioneer.
A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in which these letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase in literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together with the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural and educational pursuits. -Ron Price, Tasmania
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