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The Letters of Charles and Emma Atkin

The posts have slowed to a crawl on the blog and I thought I better explain why. I have decided to pause on the reconstruction of the family tree and concentrate my efforts on writing up a readable (and hopefully going some way towards publishable) collection of what I refer to as the 'Charles and Emma' letters. Charles was Charles Alfred Atkin, my 2x great uncle (Samuel Atkin's youngest son, and 8th of his 9 children), the chart below makes this clearer! To recap how this all came about:

In 2013 while researching my family history I was contacted by a very distant cousin on my maternal side, Jean Harrison, who had wanted to correct me about the captioning of a photograph I had on my ancestry online family tree. After a few messages back and forth it was clear that Jean had a wealth of information and I organized a visit to her home in St Leonards to see what discoveries I might be able to make. One of the most precious of her collections was a folder of over one hundred original hand written letters between her grandparents, Charles Alfred Atkin and Emma Elizabeth Atkin. The correspondence begins as Charles was leaving for the Western Australian goldfields in 1894, the couple having just professed mutual feelings for one another. Adding extra ‘spice’ was the fact that Charles and Emma were actually first cousins once removed! Little did I realise that by the end of the visit, having initially refused my rather wishful request to borrow the collection, Jean would allow me to take these home with me. So I set to work scanning every page of every letter, then also reading through and putting them into chronological order so that the story could be followed (most but not all were dated, and some had been reduced to fragments, so there were a few challenges). The collection is not complete, in that while letters from Charles date from 1894, there are no letters from Emma until 1896. But they do provide a wonderful insight into all the ups and downs of a new 'long-distance' relationship, not to mention a vivid account of life on the dusty goldfields near Coolgardie, and later in mining operations back in Victoria at Rutherglen. A lot can be learnt about Charles in particular, obviously a smart and driven individual. The collection ends in 1899, after which Charles returns to be with his Emma, the couple marrying in 1900.
A few years later, in 2017 I, together with the help of several generous volunteers, transcribed the scans of all these letters so that I could more easily glean the most useful information to put into ‘Two Brothers from Timberland,’ my history of the Atkin family in Australia that I was writing for the Diploma in Family Historical Studies run by the Society of Australian Genealogists. Given the aforementioned insights the letters provide, and the fact that more than one person expressed interest in reading them in full, I thought I should make it available to all - but not before adding some background and explanatory notes to give context to who and what is being described by Charles and Emma: the friends, relatives, places and events of the time. Which is what I am currently in the process of doing!


                                                
Charles and Emma Atkin at their wedding in 1900, and (below) one of Charles' letters



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