This work was originally published by Maynooth University in Ireland in
This is an open access work licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Letter from May Fay (1897-1976) to James Finn (1877-1922) informing him of local news. Throughout the letter May has hidden five kisses for James to find.May Fay became engaged to James Finn in January 1916. Despite the twenty year age gap their letters show a very personal and private insight into courting in early 20th century Ireland. Following her husband's death May held on to his letters as her reminder of him. May never remarried and focused her attention instead on her businesses in order to provide for their children.James Finn was a civil servant, working in the National Health Service Commission on Mount Street. While neither James nor May were politically active their letters provide a very unique insight into the affairs of Easter Week and its aftermath. James died in 1922 as a result of the flu epidemic, May was pregnant with their fourth child at the time.
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).