Milford, Connecticut
November 10, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter was written eighty-two years ago by Mabel Ross, a grieving mother in the small town of Grafton, Ontario. We’re publishing it because tomorrow is Remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day in the United States, and the person for whom Mabel Ross was grieving was her son Donald, a young Canadian soldier who was killed in World War I; but also because it shares certain qualities with our best contemporary letters: it tells a story; it has a purpose; its author writes with an original voice.

This is the second archival letter that we’ve published. The first, published last month, was written in 1865 by Jourdon Anderson, a freed American slave, to his former master.

Mabel Ross’s letter was sent to Open Letters by Stephen Workman, a professor in the department of medicine at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is Donald Ross’s great-nephew. The letters have been in his family for generations – he transcribed all 250 of them while he was writing his master’s thesis.

On Sunday, the next issue of the Open Letters weekly will go to our subscribers. If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so by sending a blank email to weekly@openletters.net; or you can learn more about subscriptionshere. On Monday, we’ll return to the web with the next installment of Paul Maliszewski’s ongoing moving saga - part one, you’ll recall, covered the moving sale; part two involved an enormous truck. Part three arrives Monday.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough