Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence

In Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe, his thought provoking essay on the premodern family, Stephen Ozment justifies dependence on personal letters to document family dynamics, stating, "Particularly in correspondence between family members, colleagues, friends, and lovers, where clarity and truth have a premium and can be matters of life and death, 'live' personal reactions to people, experiences, and events have been preserved as reliably as can be done in historical sources." Precisely, however, because the psychological and material stakes are highest in dealing with such significant others, the costs of "clarity and truth" may often be deemed too high by writers of personal letters. On the basis of research in the correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay accounts for the telling of untruths and the maintenance of strategic silences through examining the real world of situations and choices within which immigrants sought simultaneously to maintain ties with family, kin and friends in their homelands and to mislead those same parties about the circumstances of their lives.