Preserving the News from Home

I married a first generation American.  He is the only member of his family to live here in the United States, everyone else lives in Spain or Puerto Rico.  I remember years ago we used to write to family members because a long distance phone call to Spain was so expensive.  Later, the prices of the phone calls dropped and we could call more often.  In the 1990s we started emailing, and in the last few years we've used messaging and Facebook.  For the past year or two we have used Skype to make a video call to my mother-in-law.  Skype is free so we are able to do this almost every morning before my husband goes to work.  What changes I've seen in the past thirty years of our marriage!

While researching my family tree, I've seen many changes in correspondence over the centuries.  My background is almost all English, and most of my ancestors arrived in New England with the Great Migration, before 1640 with the Puritans.  I have no surviving letters, but there is evidence of correspondence in court records and town histories.  Some of these ancestors even traveled back and forth from England to Massachusetts many times.  At least one died on a voyage back to England when the ship disappeared (Reverend Thomas Mayhew (about 1620 – November 1657)).    How did the family, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, learn about this loss? 

I’m sure that many immigrants never heard from their families again once they arrived in America.  But we can’t be sure of that, can we?  My ancestor, Peter Hoogerzeil (1803 – 1889), stowed away on a Rotterdam, Netherlands ship to come to America in the 1820s.  He married the ship captain’s daughter.  How do I know this? Because of letters he wrote home to his family in the Netherlands.  Since he was a mariner, he traveled back and forth to the Netherlands very often, and his letters survived into the 20^th century.  

My uncle served in occupied Europe after World War II.  When he was in the Netherlands he dropped in to visit his Hogerzeil cousins in Dordrect.  They welcomed him with open arms, over 100 years after Peter Hoogerzeil left Dordrect, because of the family correspondence that went on over all those years. 

2nd from left, Uncle "Buddy" Joseph Gilman Allen, 

in Dordrect, Netherlands with Hogerzeil cousins

In the 1824 in Boston, Massachusetts my 4^th great grand aunt, Mary Lambert Jones (1803 – 1889) married Captain John Dominis, a ship captain.  They decided to remove from Boston and from Schenectady, New York to Honolulu, Hawaii in the 1830s.  The correspondence between Mary and her sisters and family in Boston was carefully preserved in the Hawaii State Archives.  Most of this correspondence is spread out over the last forty years of her life, after the death of her husband in 1846, at sea.

Can you imagine how long it took for letters to arrive from Hawaii to Boston in the 1840s and 1850s?  There was no formal postal system, and letters were given to ships sailing to New England on an honor system.  Even so, I’m not sure when the first news of the death of Captain Dominis reached the family.  I did find this newspaper clipping dated 24 May 1847 from the Salem Register.    The ship had disappeared four or five months earlier.  

I wonder if letters from home were accepted joyfully?  Or were they dreaded because such rare and infrequent correspondence probably carried news from home of who had died since the last letter, or who was ill, or who had disappeared at sea (it was a family of mariners).   Some of the letters to Mary Dominis were from her sisters asking her to return to Boston, but she only came home once after she was widowed, and she died in Hawaii in 1889.  Here is one from her niece in Boston written in 1848, shortly after she was widowed. 

                                          Dorchester  Aug. 13^th 1848

Dear Cousin

I found looking over my letters the other day

that I am in debt to you for two.  I thought that I must

do my best to pay you by writing to you this opportunity

I am at Aunt Agnes’ visiting they have a very pleasant

place near Granite Bridge the house is old fashioned

but very good the fireplaces about two yard long wide

and a yard and a half long the panes of glass in the

windows about as large as a sheet of note paper.

I suppose that you have almost set up business for your

self.  How do you like the house  I should like to see it

very much as I understand it is the handsomest on

the Island.  Sarah Ann is in Boston visiting I suppose

she will write to you this opportunity  we miss her

and the children very much she has two very pretty

little girls  I know that you long to see them.

Aunt Lee has left Charter St. at last and gone to

Bridgewater to live they have quite a farm I believe

keep cows hens etc.  Uncle William and Aunt Agnes send

love to your mother and she will write if she has

time but she has such a family that if the vessel

sails tomorrow she will not be able to. Do you… 

Later in the 1800s letters were carried to Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) with more frequency, and they tended to be light hearted and chatty, such as this one below from San Francisco in 1865 to Mary Dominis from her eight year old niece:

                  San Francisco, Jan. 22th, 1865

Dear Auntie,

I have got your letter,

you told me to tell you what I got on

Christmas, I got a doll, it was dressed like

redriding hood, a little wash tub and board,

a pair of gloves, a basket, and a pair of

gold sleeve buttons.  Mama has had a fire

ever since she has been here.  Mama has

a blue silk, with tails way down to the

bottom of her dress.  Mrs. Chase sent us

some pictures of our house.  On Saturday

I went to the circus.  We go to ride almost

every day.  I go to school.  I love some

friends boarding here.  Give my love

to Lydia, Jhon, Tom and Willie.

            Good bye from Annie B. Aldrich

Do you have letters from your immigrant ancestors? Or from your ancestors who removed from one city to another, perhaps moving West across the United States?

With the advent of the telephone, internet and video calling, how do we preserve these conversations now?

Soundtoll Registers Online - Danish Maritime Tax Records

Soundtoll Registers Online was created for research into the development of trade and marine transport focused on the Frisian coast, which includes parts of Holland, Germany and Denmark.  The sound between Denmark and Sweden forms a bottleneck entrance to the Baltic Sea, through which a significant proportion of European shipping passed.

A narrow strait, guarded by Kronborg castle and patrolled by warships, made it easy and lucrative for the Danish monarchy to extract tolls for the right of passage and taxes on goods. The resulting records span 1497 to 1857, being almost complete from 1574.



Mariners are often missing from census records and can be hard to indentify. The Soundtoll Registers name the ship’s master, his home port, detail the origin and destination for each voyage and list the cargo carried.

The Missing Master Mariner

Mary Hogg, a master mariner’s wife, appears of the 1851 (HO 107/1806/149/23) and 1861 (RG 9/1194/90/19) censuses at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, but her husband was absent on both occasions.  Mary was born ca. 1826 at Bermondsey, Surrey, a birthplace in common with Robert her eldest known child, born ca. 1847.  Yarmouth was the birthplace of younger children (Emma, Clara Mary, Elizabeth, George, Mary, born between 1847 and 1860) and Liverpool was the birthplace of son Arthur born ca. 1858.  Bermondsey is close to the major port of London.  Yarmouth is the colloquial name for Great Yarmouth. 

As the census information strongly suggests a sea captain named Hogg had a home port at Yarmouth, might he be recorded in the Soundtoll Register?  A search using those criteria yielded records of 2 voyages.

Extract of Soundpoll Register and transcribed record

 The transcriptions and documentation helped me understand what the Danish tax collector recorded.  A bit more work put the records in context.




R Hogg was the master of a ship that transported locally mined sulfur (svovl) from Girgenti, now called Agrigento (see International dictionary of historic places Vol 3 Southern Europe) on the island of Sicily.  The ship passed the Sound on 4 September 1847 headed for Stettin, now known as Szczecin.  The ship took on a cargo of ‘staves’ (staver), which sounds like some sort of lumber, at Stettin before passing through the Sound again on 6 October 1847, heading for London.

Armed with a forename initial R for Mary’s husband, I searched Ancestry’s collection entitled ‘London, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754-1921’ and found entry no 164.  Robert Hogg, a mariner, married Mary Calver, daughter of Robert Samuel Calver, a shipwright on 22 April 1843 at St James, Bermondsey.  The marriage was by license, which reduced the period of notice required, an important consideration for a mariner who spent much time at sea.

A Call for Collaboration

The Soundtoll Register Online is available under the generous terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-nonCommercial license, thanks to the University of Groningen and collaborative partners.  There are two ways you can contribute to the project:

• Volunteers are needed to transcribe the records prior to 1634.  If you already have some paleaographic skills, give it a go, otherwise take a look at the pages that explain old Danish handwriting.
• Use the Soundtoll register records for your own research.  That is not a big ask, is it?  Then give feedback and let the researchers know this resource has genealogical value.  The people behind this project care about quality and it shows in the website.  It is not yet as polished or extensive as the resource I highlighted last month, because the study has been underway for only a few years.