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Muriel Edwards letter
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3 pp. of textual records
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Muriel Erma Edwards, the daughter of Alice M. Mealey (1870-1953) and Hamilton Irvine Edwards (1865-1940), was born at Whitehead, Kings County, New Brunswick, on 24 August 1904. The couple had no fewer than five other children: Emma Gladys (b. 1892), Arthur Roderick (b. 1893), Harold Lee (b.1895), Arnold Roy (b.1898), and Greta Eileen (1908-1998). The children's birth records indicate that the family lived in several communities between 1892 and 1908: Saint John, St. John County; Hoyt Station and Blissville, Sunbury County; and Whitehead, Kings County.
During the First World War, Muriel Edwards, along with hundreds of other New Brunswick school children, wrote letters and sent treats to Canadian soldiers serving overseas at the Front. After completing public school and sometime prior to 1940, Muriel attended the Provincial Normal School, probably in Fredericton, N. B. By 1942 she was teaching school in or near Burton, Sunbury County. On 25 October of that year she married Charles Allen Harper, of Fredericton, at Fredericton. Little is know of her later life. Muriel Edwards Harper died on 24 May 1984 and was buried in the Fredericton Rural Cemetery.
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This letter is representative of hundreds of such thank-you letters written by Canadian soldiers serving overseas during the First World War to New Brunswick school children. Here Staff Sargeant V. A. Giles, of the 1st Canadian Division, thanks Muriel Edwards, then a girl of 11-years-old, for her letter and an "awfully nice bag of candy" he received in the post. He comments that "you cannot tell what great pleasure it gave all the Canadian Soldiers to receive them and knowing that all our dear little Girls at home are working for us."