I didn’t sit down intending to write a letter.
It started the way most research days do — with a question I thought I understood and a record I expected to confirm it. Instead, the record refused to cooperate. It didn’t contradict anything outright. It simply… stopped short.
That kind of silence is familiar. Genealogy is full of it. Still, something about this one lingered longer than usual.
At some point, without planning to, I found myself addressing someone who wasn’t there. Not the record. Not the archive. A person.
I realized I was writing to explain what I had found — and what I hadn’t — as if an explanation were owed. Not as proof. Not as conclusion. Just as context.
Letters like this don’t fit neatly into research logs. They don’t belong in timelines or footnotes. They exist in the space between evidence and meaning.
What surprised me most wasn’t the emotion — that part was familiar — but the clarity that came with it. Writing the letter forced me to slow down. It made me acknowledge assumptions I hadn’t realized I was carrying. It surfaced questions I had quietly avoided because they didn’t seem productive.
In trying to explain the research to someone else, I ended up understanding it better myself.
That’s not something a Page can capture.
Pages are built to stand on their own. They need clean edges and defensible claims. A letter, on the other hand, is allowed to be unfinished. It can acknowledge uncertainty without resolving it. It can admit that some answers matter emotionally even when they don’t change the facts.
I didn’t save the letter as part of the formal record. It didn’t need to be preserved that way. What mattered was the act of writing it — the pause it created, and the perspective it offered.
Genealogy often teaches us to look backward with precision. Occasionally, it asks us to look inward instead.
This Journal exists for moments like that — moments when the research leads somewhere quieter, more personal, and unexpectedly instructive.
I didn’t expect to write a letter that day.
But I’m glad I did.