Olive Tree Genealogy

Your ancestors’ names may be waiting for you here.

Discover your origins in letters as ancestors tell their stories and reveal family relationships, past events, moments in time and details of family history. Find your ancestors through their own letters sent to loved ones far from home.

Past Voices gives our ancestors a voice – and these voices from the past come alive in their letters. Letter writing has long been an important mode of interpersonal and official communication. As long ago as 3500 BC, Sumerians sent “letters” written on cuneiform tablets in clay “envelopes”. Letter writing flourished in the seventeenth century in Europe and it was an extremely important form of communication. As public postal services were established letter-writing increased even more dramatically.

Many letters on Past Voices are from soldiers far from home. Nothing tells the true reality of war more than the simple writings of the common soldier. These poignant letters from lonely men to their mothers, wives or sweethearts will touch your heart. Some letters will leave you bewildered by their unemotional telling of horrors almost beyond our comprehension.

Past Voices also contains letters and memoirs from ordinary individuals going about their everyday lives. These letters provide us with a sense of history, of being there and experiencing life with the people who write about the times they live in.

On Past Voices you can find your roots and hear your ancestors’ words across the generations. Add branches to your family tree as you find your genealogy.

You can also learn how to find and preserve old documents, family treasures and heirlooms.

I hope you find an ancestor, but if you do not, please take time to listen to these past voices.

“Reading letters intended for others is an exciting privilege. Each letter reveals some of the secrets, joys and imperfections of the writer. These letters resonate with human life, human experience and human relationships and appeal to us, in part, because we can relate them to ourselves or to people we know. While these letters permit us to glimpse the past and gain historical insight, we are most fascinated by our ability to overhear snatches of conversations not unlike our own. In these conversations as in ours, the said and the unsaid are equally relevant.”

Lorna Knight, Cornell’s curator of manuscripts

*I welcome submissions of letters, postcards, diaries or memoirs. Give your ancestor a voice by sharing his or her letters with us. Email submissions to Lorine.
*All submissions are copyright to the author or heirs and may not be reproduced in any format without permission of the submitter.
*Past Voices holds no copyright or ownership of letters online.