Thursday, February 20, 2014

Jennie Wishes Jimmy a Happy Birthday in 1911

This is the only letter that we have from the summer of 1911.  I was interested to discover, when I was a little girl, that my grandfather and I share a birthday.  I'm still not exactly sure what year he was born.  Maybe one of my relatives on my mom's side can tell me.

I tried, by putting a couple of the lines of the hymn Jennie quotes into Google, to learn who the author was.  It begins to appear in the mid-19th century and was collected into Darbyite collections of hymns.  Jennie's Plymouth Brethren upbringing might have been where she learned it.  In an Anglican collection, there is a first stanza before the one that Jennie begins with.  It reads:
       Give to the winds thy fears; hope and be undismayed.
       God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears; God shall lift up thy head.
"A Hymnal for use in the English Church. Compiled by Francis H. Murray"

  
  
 

Now,  notice that Jennie is signing her letter "with love" .
But they weren't able to marry for several more years.

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