I don't believe that I ever saw the original letters from Granny. Sometime before the mid-seventies, my grandmother laboriously transcribed them with a typewriter and that is what I started with.

Strictly speaking, there are numerous spelling and punctuation errors throughout those letters. For example, there is not a single apostrophe. Whether this was normal for the time, a quirk of Granny's, or the result of Grandma's struggle with the typewriter I do not know. Similarly, I can only guess at the source of particular spellings. Daytona appears as Datona and Datonia as well as Daytona; Rabbit often appears with one 'b'.

I have corrected most of these technical errors in the excerpts that accompany the daily reports. This is because automated checkers keep reminding me of them and I did not want them getting between the reader and the content. I have tried to keep the full-length versions as faithful to the original typed copy as possible.

In addition to the "grammatical" errors, there are words to which the euphemism "politically incorrect" is readily applied. Granny talks of darkeys and niggers and I was tempted to "correct" these as well since they could prove even more of a distraction. But, unlike the spelling and punctuation, these were not accidents. Granny was no racist but these words were as natural to her as calling their automobile "the machine". More time has passed between Granny's writing and today than had passed between her writing and the Emancipation Proclamation. The time between the Civil War and Granny's writing was just about the same as the time between WW II and the present.

Each daily page includes the letters written within the area of the day's travel. For anyone interested in them in their entirety, here they are in both Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF formats. Free readers are available for both.

Adobe PDF version of Granny's Letters (100 KB)
Microsoft Word version of Granny's Letters (121 KB)