After Henry² York emigrated to Canada in 1844, he wrote letters back home.  These letters are the source of many of the family traditions about the family in England and their early days in Canada.  Family members in England also wrote to him.

Some of the letters survived and in about 1944 many of them were in the hands of Alice⁴ (Ivens) Sanders in England.  She sent them to George Dallas⁴ York.

In the early 1980's Alton Meldon⁴ York visited Jacob Prentice⁵ York, son of George Dallas York, and borrowed the original letters from him.  Alton made a handwritten copy and then a typed copy of the letters and then returned them to Jacob Prentice⁵ York who very kindly shared the originals with me.

Other letters have survived in the collections of Geraldine⁵ (Garnett) Savage and Robert Alton⁵ York.  Gerry's letters were among the papers of her mother, Alice Garnett, and many of them probably were originally among the belongings of Elizabeth (Prentice) York and passed along to her daughter Lydia Maud Stevenson who was the last child living near by.  Also, Lydia went to Iowa to visit and may have brought some of the letters back with her.

Photocopies of these original letters from Gerry Savage and Bob York were kindly shared with me.  These letters are so noted.  In most cases, the letter has been proofed with the original, rather than a photocopy.

Not all of the originals of the letters to England were actually written by Henry.  It was common practice for family members in England to make handwritten copies to share with family members who lived at a distance.  Some of the original letters appear to be such copies and are so noted.

Henry did not use envelopes when mailing his letters.^(Photo)  Instead, he folded the pages, sealed them shut, probably with wax, and addressed the outside, to his father, and later to his brother-in-law, George Kinch, with whom his mother lived.  These addresses help to identify those letters which were written by Henry and also help to identify dates, from the postmarks.

Reading the original letters and correctly interpreting them is a challenge.  All of the correspondents wrote in a stream, without any paragraphs and usually with no punctuation to show the end of a thought.  Although others did better and copies of his letters corrected his spelling, Henry's spelling is very creative, apparently primarily phonetic.

When this compiler compared Alton's typed copies to originals of the available handwritten letters, it was apparent that Alton did not try to make an exact copy.  For example, some phrases were left out, words were inserted to make sentences grammatically more appropriate and spelling errors were corrected. 

Therefore, a decision was made to transcribe a new set of copies, working from the originals or photocopies of originals whenever possible.  In these new copies, the spelling is retained whenever the word is legible enough to do so.

Alton's typed copies were very helpful in understanding some of the words that were nearly illegible.  In some cases the present transcription has a different interpretation of a word, particularly a name.  This is largely due to a greater familiarity with other records in both Long Buckby and St. Vincent that were not available to Alton.

An additional source of letters has been the newspapers of the time.

The letters are shown in chronological sequence regardless of author.

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