This week we're starting the 2nd month of Noah and Ethel's courtship, as the last letter posted was Feb 27 Dear Ethel. The letters are mentioning more names, some of whom I recognize, and others that send me into research mode. I'm beginning to think I should start posting a genealogy chart to keep the names straight.
for I will always have a reason.
true to my promise, "eh"
until Pa can get another Farm.
Regina! and what does she do!
little girl sitting beside Ethel in the school photograph. From the census records, we also know that a Morton Family farmed next door to Ethel's family.
write it one way, but it appears another on all the census records.
However, the letter is written by Ethel and I've noticed in some of the letters written by the Nelson family, they sometimes even spell Sadie as Sadye - as you'll see when I post a July 1911 letter written by Ethel's paternal grandmother who lives in Iowa.
Hey Deb, about those eh's, as I transcribed Ethel's letter, I was drawn to her use of quotation marks in the 2 instances she used the word, whereas Noah uses the word without them. Why?
My conclusion is that it it was a normal part of Noah's speech, but not Ethel's. Again, I ask, why? Both families went to the same one-room schoolhouse. Both families not only had lived in the same village for a couple generations, their family farms were next door to each other.
However, Noah's family moved 'out west' to Saskatchewan soon after Noah (the youngest child) completed school in 1903. By the time Noah and Ethel began their courtship letters, he'd been living out west for 8 yrs.
Could this have been where he picked up the expression, 'eh'?