Treasure Chest Thursday - "I'll be out to see you"

It's Treasure Chest Thursday - time to "show and tell" a goodie from the ephemera, papers and artifacts collected over several lifetimes by members of the Seaver and Carringer family trees.

Today the adage that "There are things that happen in a second that take a lifetime to explain" rings loud and clear with this letter from my Father, Frederick W. Seaver, dated 18 December 1940, to his aunt and uncle, George and Emily (Richmond) Taylor in San Diego:




Fred wrote this from Columbus, Ohio on 18 December 1940, and he said that he hoped to arrive on Sunday, 22 December. This was going to be a big surprise to the Taylor family, of course! He had the foresight to warn them, at least. Here is the face of the envelope:



At least he sent it air Mail! I wonder when it arrived? Probably December 20 or 21.

Why did Fred leave New England? There are two stories. The "official" story is that he got tired of shoveling snow at his sister's house. The "non-official" story, the one told by his sisters and their daughters - every one of them - is discussed in A Challenging Moral Dilemma.

This decision by my father to drive west to San Diego , for whatever reason, changed his whole life. He ended up 2,500 miles away from the only family he'd ever known, yet he never went back. He didn't know what the future held - work, marriage, children, military service, interests, retirement, sickness, death. But I'm happy that he made it to San Diego and that the rest is history. See what I mean by "There are things that happen in a second that take a lifetime to explain?"

In many cases, genealogists and family historians don't have an explanation of how or why our ancestors migrated from one place to another. In some cases, there are immigration records so we can pin down a date, but we often cannot pinpoint a year, or a month in a year, when a migration took place.