Preface

In August of 2012 I discovered that the State Historical Society of Missouri had a collection of letters from a John R. Tayloe. Up to that point I hadn't had any luck finding Tayloe information or Tayloe relatives. I looked through my family tree to see if I had a John R. Tayloe and I realized it was my Great Grandma, Sarah Tayloe Pfeiffer's brother! The description of this collection wasn't very in depth, but it did say it had correspondence from relatives in Idaho. That was enough to convince me that I had to find a way to read these letters.

I wrote the Historical Society and asked them for a quote on having all the letters copied. They promptly responded with this:

Dear Ms. Pittman,

Thank you for your e-mail.

The Tayloe Family Papers (C2510) consists of four liner feet of manuscript material. This would be equivalent to four “banker” boxes. There are 72 folders in the collection. As a general rule of thumb, each folder contains 30 to 35 pages. Each copy costs .25 cents. It would cost somewhere around $600 to copy the entire collection and that does not including shipping and handling. Staff members would first need to determine whether or not the papers are too fragile to photocopy. The collection has not been microfilmed or digitized.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

This news should have been devastating, but all I could think about was how many letters there must be! I asked my friend Norma in Kansas City if she would be willing to go make copies “of the Pfeiffer letters”. She agreed and when she began going through all the banker boxes she called and said “I think you are going to want more of these than you thought”. That was the beginning of this whole crazy project.

Norma spent weeks at the museum- for which I will be forever grateful. After all the copies were made and mailed to me I saw just how much work it was going to be to read and type all these letters. I spent over 40 hours straining to read and then typing up the letters. I struggled with how I should do it- whether or not to leave all the spelling exactly as it was, or to make it easier to read by correcting spelling and grammatical errors. I decided on something in the middle- fixing spelling (like if “certainly” was spelled “sertanly” I would type the word as it was intended, but leave any grammar in its original colloquial form.

After typing the letters I wanted to know more about who these people were and how they were all connected. Besides just wanting to know their story, I felt an obligation to share the letters with their descendants. This was the first step in another amazing part of this project. I met 5 wonderful families. Their willingness to share pictures, stories and even make trips to search for obituaries or copy pages from history books for me was humbling.

This project has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever worked on. While I wish I could have known all this information years ago, I don't feel like it was supposed to happen before it did. As soon as I found out about the Tayloe collection and wrote the museum, I went to visit Cousin Maxine. When I walked into her house, I saw a picture of the Tayloe siblings sitting on her counter (I only knew it was them because someone, not Maxine, had labeled it). Maxine had never shown it to me before and said she didn't really know anything about it- she had just found it while sorting through papers. There were so many odd, encouraging things like that which happened along the way.

I am beyond ecstatic to have shared these letters with so many people- some have told me that it has inspired them to type up old letters and diaries from their own ancestors so that they can also be preserved and enjoyed for many more years.

I still find new things in the letters to marvel at each time I read them. It is amazing how ordinary people can make the most interesting story I've ever read. I will always treasure this opportunity to learn more about my family and to keep their story alive. 

 

I also need to give a big thank you to my husband for his help, including creating the lexicon for me. He has been incredibly supportive of this whole process and even offered for me to fly to Missouri if that was what needed to be done.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives. I hope these letters bring you even a fraction of the enjoyment it has brought me in putting them together.