Kassia Waggoner and Adam Nemmers, Yours in Filial Regards: The Civil War Letters of a Texas Family. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2015. 192 pp. Paper $27.50.

At two hundred and fifty-two pages, Yours in Filial Regards: The Civil War Letters of a Texas Family is an impressive compilation of a single Texas family’s cohesive Civil War correspondence. Brought together in chronological order and given context by its invested editors, Yours in Filial Regards reveals the narrative of the Love family of Limestone County. The history is not simply that of Civil War politics but that of this prominent, extended family maintaining relationships during a trying time. Members of the family would later hold political office in and around the greater Fort Worth/Dallas area. The letters were discovered in a garage sale in the 1990s and donated to the Mary Couts Burnett Library of Texas Christian University, where the editors of this book began examining the Love family’s letters as a graduate project.

Readers will be impressed by the consideration of the editorial method formulated by editors Kassia Waggoner and Adam Nemmers, as it removes barriers that researchers of Civil War correspondence often encounter. Waggoner and Nemmers offer editorial markings that preserve the intentions of the Love family’s particular notations, which have been digitized since their initial compilation. To that extent, this volume becomes a welcome translation, which can be read in tandem with the original documents, especially for those challenged by the handwriting of the period, allowing each author’s voice to become fully realized.

Altogether, Yours in Filial Regards contains an impressive seventy-three numbered letters as well as representations of ten mixed materials preserved from the single family spanning from 1859 to 1866. Pictures have been included to illustrate the authors of letters where available. The Love family includes soldiering brothers, their sisters, and their parents. It is through their voices that readers learn of issues regarding women on the home front, illnesses, economics, and, of course, battling. Waggoner and Nemmers note insights not available to readers of the text without reference to the original documents such as the fact that soldiering brothers—Cyrus, Sam, James, and John Love—did not appear concerned with constraints on paper materials as their exemplary handwriting was never minimized to cramped effect. These insights are balanced and considerate without being leading.

As a narrative, the family’s authors, subjects, and addressees include brother-in-law John Karner, Eliza Terrisa Love (Tea), Mary Elizabeth Love Karner (Bettie or Betty), Ellen Love, Fannie Farnsworth, and Lou Karner. It is through the rhetoric describing each that we learn how letters of the time were composed, shared, and even mailed or received through the strained trust of postal systems and from families to community. The letters themselves explain to readers that trust of those carriers was not built overnight. The family encouraged each other despite the environment to pursue endeavors of the mind and toward their knowledge in the arts and sciences, an encouraging sentiment even today. The triumphs of this particular book are those very insights presented to its audience through the editors’ diligent research, commentary, and editorial inventiveness.

Rob King

Texas Tech University