In early 1958 an envelope was delivered to the mailbox at the home beside the Methodist Church in Orleans, Indiana. Inside the envelope was a typed and single-spaced letter that was at least 14 pages long and contained nearly 10,000 words.
Dated January 31, 1958, the letter began:
Dearest Marcia:
As you are the only one of our entire clan that manifests an interest in our family tree, I will to the best of my limited ability try to give you an outline of your father’s as well as my own early life, and of the environment in which we were reared.
I hope this will prove of interest to you, and that you will be lenient and forgive errors grammatical, in composition, spelling and typing, all of which I am nothing but a tyro1, which I hasten to admit.
The sender of the letter was Virgil Bravard Browne. The recipient was Marcia Moore Sagebiel, his niece and my mother.
I imagine that was a good day for Marcia, discovering her uncle’s long letter in the mailbox. She was a curious soul who would collect family stories and genealogical information for decades to come.
I also imagine that Marcia had asked Uncle Virgil in a letter to share his memories of Noble, Illinois, where he was born and raised around the turn of the 20th century. Noble was also the birthplace of her father, Raymond Milton Moore, Virgil’s younger half-brother.
Marcia was 26, the wife of a minister, Ralph Sagebiel, and the mother of two boys, Kent, a toddler, and Neil, a baby. The young family lived in Orleans, a town of 1,500 people in the rolling hills of Southern Indiana. It was during this busy time that she corresponded with her distant uncle, who lived in Colorado and California in his middle and later years.
I imagine that Uncle Virgil’s letter must have been an enjoyable read during Marcia’s precious free moments. For as he wrote, “I couldn’t parse a verb, but I could tell a story.”
The letter traveled with Marcia the rest of her life, from Orleans to Indianapolis to Evansville in Indiana, to Palmdale and Lancaster in California, and to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where she died in March 2023.
Passing the Baton
I first received a copy of my great uncle’s letter more than 20 years ago, one of many family items and photographs mom occasionally handed to me in manila folders and oversized envelopes. At those times, I sensed they were important handoffs, even if I was too busy or distracted to devote attention to the materials. It was as if she was also passing a baton to me with the unspoken words, “This is our family history. Take care of it.”
Mom pursued her passion for family history until dementia stole nearly all of her memories and mental capacity. But she did a lot while she could, spending long hours in her home office, often struggling to master her computer.
She was a determined lady. That’s why there was a baton to pass and why I have stories to share.
Revisiting Uncle Virgil’s Letter
In the spring of 2024 while traveling America, I read and re-read Uncle Virgil’s letter, accessing it on Google Drive with my smartphone. (Mom would have loved today’s technology.)
I did some light editing and rewriting of the letter while I sat in hotel rooms or in the homes of family and friends. I did the work on my phone, a few paragraphs at a time, because I chose not to carry my laptop around the country. Those were fun moments, hearing my great uncle’s distinctive voice in my head and learning about his life more than a century ago in rural Illinois.
My hand in editing his story was, and is, for clarity and readability, including footnotes as needed to explain words (such as “tyro” above) and expressions that were in usage during his lifetime. However, Uncle Virgil’s voice remains, telling stories about small-town life and boyhood adventures, sprinkled with mischief.
I could not have anticipated being his collaborator, but here I am. So next time I will begin a series called “A Boy Named Virgil.”
Until then, when we meet that boy,
Neil
Thank you for reading. If you liked this slice of FRIED BOLOGNA, please click the 🤍.
A “tyro” is a beginner or novice (Oxford Languages).
Family history rocks!
Thank goodness for Uncle Virgil and congrats on the launch of new adventure.