This work was originally published by Maynooth University in Ireland in
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This letter is from a series of correspondence between James Finn and his fiancée Mary (May) Fay. The letter refers to May's impending visit and also to a wedding of a person known to the both of them.James Finn and Mary Fay became engaged in January 1916 and married in June. They were not to be married long as in 1919 he fell ill with the great flu epidemic, it led to heart damage and he died in 1922 as she was expecting their fourth child. She held on to his letters as her reminder of him. James Finn (1877 - 1922) was a civil servant, working in the National Health Service Commission on Mount Street. Family history says that he was advising on the restructuring of the civil service as part of setting up the new government in 1922 and that eminent figures in that project were visiting him in his sick bed so that they could consult with him. Neither May nor James were politically active, although like many in the Civil Service, learned Irish. One can sense their shifting sympathies in the letters.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).