Madison volunteer transcribing Civil War letters

MADISON, Conn. (AP) - Bill Morrissey of Madison has a new appreciation for the joys of letter-writing.

Sure, up here in the real world, people are always tweeting and texting, messaging, blogging and Facebooking while they follow and "friend" and e-chat each other up. But every Tuesday evening and Friday morning, Morrissey walks down a simple staircase in Memorial Town Hall in Madison and the modern world just falls away.

Down there, in the Charlotte L. Evarts Memorial Archives, he enters the world of the Civil War era, when people wrote letters as part of daily life.

Specifically, Morrissey has spent three years steeped in the letters that were once written to a prominent town citizen, George Wilcox, who was a nephew of Madison's own Daniel Hand, and who lived 1830-1928.

Morrissey and the other volunteers, Charlotte Neely, Nancy Farnam and Loma Corcoran, are going through the letters, organizing them into plastic binders and then transcribing them onto a computer.

Last summer, they worked on most of the Civil War letters for a project for the town, and now they are working on the rest.

Morrissey estimates there are nearly 1,000 letters, correspondence written over the course of about 60 years, sent to Wilcox mostly from his older brother, Daniel Hand Wilcox, who had moved to Georgia upon his graduation from Yale College. The letters had been stored all these years in Wilcox's home on Island Avenue, and were given to the town by Wilcox's granddaughter, Maria Elena Pignatelli. They arrived in boxes.

Morrissey says he doesn't believe the family had ever read all the letters, since they were tied up so neatly in packets. The boxes, he said, contained a few mouse droppings here and there.

But they give a wonderful picture of daily life in Civil War times for this prominent and well-to-do Northern family, he says.

"We get to read about the anxiety that Daniel felt, living in the South during the turbulent times of the Civil War," he says. "I don't think Daniel's sympathies ever left the Union.

He wrote about his unease with the election of Abraham Lincoln, because he didn't think the South was going to accept him. Later, he joined a Southern militia to make people feel he wasn't a Northern sympathizer, but he was later arrested as a spy and was finally acquitted. How he left the militia, we have no idea."

After Lincoln's assassination, there was a very moving letter from Daniel, speaking of his grief and anxiety about what would happen to the country. "I fear the greatest disaster to the nation as a consequence," he wrote. "(Andrew) Johnson cannot fill Lincoln's place."

George Wilcox, having graduated from Yale College, studied law briefly in Georgia and then moved to Detroit, where he lived and practiced law until his retirement in 1892. At that time, he returned to Madison and married, at age 65, for the first time.

He and his wife, Mary Hobart Grenelle, had one daughter, Constance Grenelle Wilcox, who later married Prince Guido Pignatelli dei duchy di Montecalvo.

"Unfortunately, we don't have George's letters to his brother," says Morrissey, "so we really only have one half of the story. But we do have some letters from sisters and cousins and another younger brother to George. It's a fascinating look at daily life."

One of the most interesting features of the letters is that the correspondence written by the women of the family uses a particular "criss-cross" form of writing. That is, the letter writer goes both horizontally and vertically across the page, so that after reading the horizontal lines, the reader must turn the letter the other way and read the vertical lines which are imposed on top of the other writing. "It's very difficult to learn to read," says Morrissey.

He feels that it was some kind of fashionable way to write a letter, since it was only practiced by young women, and not in the men's letters at all.

But Nancy Bastian, the town's archivist, says it could also have been a way of conserving paper during hard times.

Neely says she loves doing the work because she gets involved in the story of people's lives.

"I find the letters so interesting when they write about who is sick and who's been disabled during the war," she says. "Because they wrote every day, you get so caught up in the story, and then after reading about their lives for a while, you come upon a letter that talks about that person dying, and it's like you lost a friend. Really, it becomes so real." Continued...

At first, she admits, it's difficult to figure out the spelling and conventions of the times. "The spelling can be very creative. They often put the endings of words on the line above, and there are odd abbreviations. It's like a foreign language. Once you learn that, though, it's half the battle."

Morrissey says he gets so engrossed that he often works on the project at home. "Once you get transcribing, you don't want to stop, you want to see what happens next," he says. "You see the personalities of the people. Remember,