Welcome to the Parker-Coffin letters website!
This site contains correspondence between my grandparents, Ruth J. Parker (1913-2007) and David W. Coffin (1909-1986), during the years leading up to their marriage in 1936. Ruth coveted these letters for 70 years, until her death in 2007. My mother, Catherine Coffin Williams, transcribed these letters, and my cousin, Lisa Walsh Dougherty, provided the family history and compiled the photographs that are included with these letters.
The purpose of this website is to share this history with family members, descendants, cousins, and with anyone with an interest in U.S. history from the mid-1930’s. These letters are uncensored private conversations between two young people from that time period. Unbeknownst to my grandparents, these letters are a real gift to us and I’ll leave it at that.
This site is set up in a blog format. I will be posting these letters a few at a time, and have added notes relevant to the history and to some of the accompanying photos. I welcome comments, especially if you, the reader, can provide more information with respect to historical aspects of the letters, or even if you happen to have known or be descended from anyone mentioned in these pages and have information, photographs, or otherwise, that you can share. We’d love to hear it, and perhaps I can add updates to the annotations.
How to use this site:
For the background story to these letters, please click here.
The letters are posted in chronological order, starting from December 1934. If you are new to this site and want to read through from the beginning, click here.
Starting from March 11, 1935, the letters are posted a week at a time, starting from Mondays. Dave would visit Ruth in Albany every Sunday, so the letters were sent from Monday to Friday or even Saturday (and sometimes handed to the recipient).
Use the “Search” tool (top right corner of this page) to find any person(s), relatives, or events of interest where they might be mentioned, and a list of posts should appear if they contain your search term.
Enjoy reading!
-Julie Williams
the site-keeper
photo caption: Coffin homestead, Middleburg, NY. The dog’s name might be “Tex”