Valerie Teed says transcribing about 200 old letters sentence by sentence for almost two years gave her a connection to a clever, humorous, witty man she learned to love

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CANDICE MAC LEAN
KV STYLE

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Kâté Braydon photo

Valerie Teed has been bitten by the genealogy bug.

Courtesy Valerie Teed

The cover of 'Uncle Cy's War.'

Courtesy Valerie Teed

Cyrus F. Inches in uniform.

Kâté Braydon photo

Valerie Teed looks at some old postcards that the voice behind her book, Cyrus F. Inches, mailed home with some of his letters.

Kâté Braydon photo

Old letters that Valerie Teed used in her book.

Kâté Braydon photo

Some of the old letters that Valerie Teed transcribed for her book.

Do you want to see some letters?
That was the question that set Valerie Teed on a path that eventually led to her having a book published.
More than a decade ago, the Rothesay woman started researching her husband’s family history, as her own had already been studied by her parents. A relative asked if she wanted to see some old letters written in the early-to-late 1800s and as she researched and uncovered more, Teed realized she had been bitten by the genealogy bug.
“It doesn’t hit a large segment of the population but the few of us that it does, it hits you and you get addicted,” she said, adding that she has assembled a handful of historical compilations herself over the years.
More than 10 years ago, her addiction led her to a family auction where she and her husband purchased a drawer from an antique, built-in dresser. Inside, she found two narrow boxes packed with letters written by her husband’s great uncle from 1914 to 1919.
These almost 200 letters would go on to be the subject of Teed’s first book, called Uncle Cy’s War: The First World War Letters of Major Cyrus F. Inches, to be released next month.
“The thing is when these bits reach you, you can’t just leave it,” she said of the letters. “So many of these letters were muddled with this indelible pencil and they were stuck together and I would pry them apart and I would hold them up to the light (but) most of the stuff was legible and I’d go sentence by sentence.
“I did not want them to die with me.”
Teed’s book will be published under the New Brunswick Military Heritage Project. The project is a partnership between Goose Lane Editions and the University of New Brunswick.
It will be the 14th book in the project’s series.
The idea to turn the letters into a book in the series came from another contributor to the heritage project.
“I said ‘I’ve got a bunch of letters here’ and I showed him and he said ‘You have a book,’” Teed recalled.
Over the next 18 months, Teed transcribed every letter that Uncle Cy, as she calls him, had written to his mother and his older brother during the war.
“The thrust of this book to me is personal even though it’s got a lot of good information for historians,” Teed said. “There’s a lot of stuff that Uncle Cy knew because he knew the officers in command.”
The book follows the Canadian officer, who was 38 when the letters began, from Valcartier and the First Battle of Ypres to Mons and the months of demobilization after that.
“There are a lot of letters from the wars and a lot of books that have transcribed the letters from the war,” Teed said. “This one is different because of the writer. Uncle Cy knew many of the military strategies, he knew the politics going on, he was an avid reader.”
Teed said the letters are personal but also technical.
“He was in the dug-outs, he was in the mud, he was in the fights, he was gassed. He wasn’t just a guy sitting in an office somewhere,” she said. “He had this wonderful empathy for the people he was with and a terrific sense of humour. The letters were just as clever and well written as if he was writing for publication himself.”
Teed said she never planned to have such an interest in genealogy, but the more she uncovers, the more she feels compelled to give the information a place in history.
“It’s about leaving your mark,” she said. “It’s a sense of gratification for me. It’s very gratifying to know that I have created something for perpetuity; something that is going to prevent this information, this history, from dying.”
Through her reading and transcribing, Teed said she learned to respect Inches and his life.
“I learned to love the man,” she said. “I never met him and at the end of 18 months I was absolutely as fond of him as you could be of anybody. His writing is impeccable.
“It was a real feeling of friendship. It was real. I would be laughing out loud. It was like a connection with the spirit of this man.”
Inches, a lawyer, went on to live at the Admiral Beatty Complex in Saint John and never married, Teed said. He died in 1956.
A book launch for Uncle Cy’s War: The First World War Letters of Major Cyrus F. Inches will take place Nov. 26 at Rothesay Netherwood School at 7:30 p.m. It will be available at major bookstores throughout the province after the launch.