This was her engagement photo. It came to me damaged; the entire bottom part of the photo was almost black, and I managed to restore it to this point. What a beautiful woman she was, though she didn’t seem to think so. This morning I was reading a letter from her dated May 28, 1862, written to her sweetheart (whom she married the next year). She says “It really is a mystery to me that I am loved….I possess no beauty, neither am I remarkably talented as some girls are, nor do I possess any particular recommendation to attract anyone…” Maybe she was just being modest, so that he could answer about how lovely, etc, she was.
Since he, my great-grandfather, was a sea-captain in Bermuda, he was often away from home, and wrote many letters back and forth between 1857 and 1904. Cross-written on both sides of onion-skin paper, hundreds of them were all kept in a linen pillowcase, and eventually came down to my grandmother, and then to my mother, who spent years studying and typing them out. She donated the originals to the Bermuda Archives, becoming the largest collection they. had to that point. My cousin John Cox of Bermuda used them and Mother’s transliteration to publish Opened Letters, Opened Lives in 2024. I just started rereading the book, and it’s fascinating.
Ann Dickinson Sargent 