Your letter was not necessarily written by one family member to one other person. Often letters were joint efforts by several members of an extended family in one place, writing to several other members if the family living in another place. Imagine all the hands (and brains!) that might have had an input into your family letter, all the eyes that might have read it and all the ears that might have had its contents read out to them . Different paragraphs of a single letter might have had different intended audiences with some less personal bits being read out to friends and acquaintances as interesting news from another part of the country or even another country. Sometimes letter writers wrote personal information at the tops and bottoms of letters with the understanding that the main recipient would read and remove these before the letter was passed around to a wider audience. Alternatively separate sheets within the letter might carry information meant for different readers.
Tracing Your Ancestors Through Letters and Personal Writings
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Two unidentified women reading a letter between 1860 and 1870
Via Wikimedia Commons
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