NORMAN MELLOR, EMIGRANT TO AMERICA, CORRESPONDENCE AND PHOTOGRAPHS (C407)

Mainly to his parents and later to his sister, Alice Ann, and her husband. Also one letter to Mellor from an Apache friend 1897; and photographs covering the same period

Norman Mellor was an emigrant to America from South Crosland and he wrote letters to his family and sent photographs. As a young man in 1881, Norman Mellor, the fifth child in a family of ten children, ran away from his home in South Crosland, near Huddersfield, to seek his fortune, with two companions from whom he was separated once they arrived in Montreal . He continued on his own way to New Mexico from whence his parents received their first letter from him some eighteen months later, probably in 1883. The letters in this collection include two from a Mr Edwin Bottomley in Canada and North America, to Norman's father, preceding the date of this first letter from Norman, in which Edwin mentions his efforts to trace Norman.

Norman eventually moved from New Mexico to Arizona, but contrived to correspond with his family, particularly with his youngest sister, Alice Ann, to whom all the later letters are addressed. The fourteen letters from him in this collection span some fifty-two years and in some cases, long intervals of time elapse from one to another. The collection accompanies a set of photographs, possibly which Norman himself took to send back to England, since he seems to have been a keen artist and photographer. Two or three of these are referred to in the letters. The last letter in the collection is dated 3 Aug 1935, and a photograph of Norman's grave reveals that he died three years later, in 1938.

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