Letter from Judge Henry C. Hammond to Amy, June 14, 1940 (page 1)
Book 1, Page 6 ·1781–1940
Transcription
A typewritten letter, page 1 of multiple, on the letterhead of Hammond, Kennedy & Yow (Lawyers — Southern Finance Building, Augusta, Georgia). The three named partners on the letterhead are Henry C. Hammond, F. Frederick Kennedy, and D. Field Yow. A pencilled “Note 3 –” is added in the upper-right corner.
June 14th, 1940.
Dear Amy:—
Your letter to Mary Gwynn Hammond, Kathwood, S. C., has been turned over to me for reply. This is made difficult by our common ignorance of Fitzsimmons family history. It is deplorable, uncivilized, shocking, common, vulgar, and everything else to realize how little we know about even our nearby ancestors. Says the Bible—“And the memory of them is forgotten”. Most family biography and tradition is slushy, laudatory, utterly unreliable. It should be starkly truthful to be of value. The noble and the ignominious should be recorded side by side. Just one illustration. My father deliberately pointed out to me in detail how eighty per cent of those in the three generations just ahead of my own had been drunkards. This gruesome lesson kept me from being one. I’m barely worth a damn as it is and but for this early impression I would not have been worth the half of that. Show a child that his great-grandfather was a hero, but his wife was a witch and it might do some good. Pardon all this by the way stuff.
Briefly, Christopher Fitzsimmons (nineteen years old) came to Charleston from Ireland (Catholic part of it — though he didn’t ever have time for religion and very lit-
AI Notes
Page 1 of a multi-page typewritten letter from Judge Henry C. Hammond to Amy, June 14, 1940. Written on Hammond, Kennedy & Yow letterhead from Augusta, GA. Hammond replies to Amy’s family-history inquiry — originally addressed to Mary Gwynn Hammond at Kathwood, S.C. — with a striking opening preamble on the unreliability of family tradition. The letter continues onto the following scan. The upper-right pencilled ‘Note 3 –’ is in Amy’s own hand, likely her filing index for Hammond’s series of replies (cf. the captioned envelope on p004). The letterhead’s three named partners are H[enry] C. Hammond, F. Frederick Kennedy, and D. Field Yow. The spelling ‘Fitzsimmons’ (double-m) used by Hammond throughout this letter represents a third surname variant alongside ‘Fitz Simons’ and ‘FitzSimons’ seen elsewhere in the album.
The letter cuts off mid-sentence at the bottom of the page; it continues on the next scan. The author is almost certainly Henry C. Hammond, the senior partner on the letterhead and very likely the same Judge Henry Hammond whose letters about FitzSimons family history Amy preserved on page 004 (the captioned envelope there reads “Letters from Judge Henry Hammond about the Fitz Simons family — one to Aunt Ellen Fitz Simons and one to Amy Walker”). His spelling “Fitzsimmons” — with a double “m” — is a third variant of the surname, distinct from both “Fitz Simons” and “FitzSimons” used elsewhere in the family record. The Bible passage is Ecclesiastes 9:5: “for the memory of them is forgotten.” The “Note 3” annotation suggests Amy filed and numbered Hammond’s letters as a series.