Join our search for the Greatest, Undiscovered Love Letter of all time!
To celebrate Valentine’s Day this year – we’ve launched a search for the most romantic, undiscovered love letter of all time and created an online gallery featuring some significant love letters throughout the centuries.
With Wendy Holden, one of the UK’s most popular contemporary writers judging the entries, take a chance and perhaps your love letter will join ranks with some of the greatest romantic correspondence throughout the years. To enter the competition – click here.
Do you know anything about the courtship of your parents of grandparents? How did they meet? Was it love at first sight?
The moment they fell in love was a critical moment in determining your own existence – yet a lot of us know nothing about these romances. Love letters from the past can hold these secrets.
So do you have any love letters, cards, poems or romantic notes sent between your relatives or ancestors? If so, we would love you to share them with us and tell us the stories behind them – which bring to life the histories of the people whose romances made you. We’d love to see some related photographs as well.
Or perhaps you have a love letter of your own from recent years that you’d like to share with us? If you don’t have any love letters stashed away, perhaps this is the time to put pen to paper and help revive the more traditional way of expressing one’s sentiments.
Entries will be accepted here until Sunday 20th February – and the winning letter will be showcased on the competition page and in the media on Friday 25th February.
To provide a little inspiration, MyHeritage.com has teamed-up with a number of leading UK museums and archives – including the British Library, Museum of the Royal Navy, and Imperial War Museum– to obtain scans (and transcripts) of significant British love letters from the past 500 years. They include some unknown gems such as the oldest love letter in recorded history from 1477 (courtesy of the British Library), letters from a Naval serviceman in the 1800s stationed in Shanghai (courtesy of the Museum of the Royal Navy), and a letter written during World War II by an unknown airman (courtesy of the Imperial War Museum). You can also find some famous historic love letters from Henry VIII, Sir Walter Raleigh and a copy of the love song, Loch Lomond. These historical love letters can be found in an online gallery at www.myheritage.com/loveletters.
So what are you waiting for? Send us a love letter today (click here) and perhaps your family’s name will go down in the history of romantic correspondence.
We send thanks to our judge, Wendy Holden, for her involvement. Wendy (author of The School For Husbands, Beautiful People and Gallery Girl) is the UK’s best-selling chick-lit author. Wendy Holden’s latest book, Gallery Girl, a comic insight into the glamorous and highly topical world of art, will be available in paperback from Thursday February 17th. Wendy’s forthcoming novel Marrying Up (a comedy of love, royals and rampant social climbing), will be published in July.
Happy Valentine’s Day from us all at MyHeritage.com
