Letters From the Box

My second-great grandparents seem like an unlikely couple: he's a Yankee from Illinois, but with roots back to New England and the Mayflower; she's a quintessential Southern girl, born during Reconstruction in rural southwestern Virginia.   Taylor Holt, ca. 1888 T.H. = Taylor Holt F.H.K. = Frances Huckstep Kyle T.T.L.V. = you'll have to wait and see Taylor Holt was born in Kankakee, Illinois, on February 13, 1868. He was the only child of Stephen Philip and Aurelia "Lelila" Morgan Grimes  Holt.  Stephen died before Taylor's first birthday, so Lelia took Taylor back to her hometown of Princeton, Illinois to live with her mother and sisters in their little house on the southeast corner of the Main Square.  After Taylor graduated from Princeton High School, he lived for a little while in Chicago, where he apprenticed himself with a metal worker.  Though I haven't found the name of his employer there, he wrote in a letter to his family in October 1886, ...

This old sea chest is what started it all: my fascination with genealogy, my desire to learn everything I possibly could about the people  that were in that box.  I had seen it many times before in the attic of my grandparents' old farmhouse in Winchester, Virginia.  When I was young, it didn't hold much interest for me - there weren't any obvious photographs or anything - just a bunch of papers.  When I went to Loveland, Colorado in the summer of 2018 to visit my parents and my grandfather, I came across it again. Only this time, I was entranced.  I started to read some of the letters - they were mushy love letters written in the 1800s and I was hooked. When asked, my grandfather (who probably got this chest from his Aunt Royall Holt Tyler, though I'll never know now) was thrilled that I'd taken an interest in the family history and told me I could take it home with me.  And so I did and I've been reading and transcribing the contents within ever since....