Peru – The Bremners of Peru

The bound volumes of rice-paper carbon copies.

An example of the handwriting on the rice-paper pages.

Many pages were typed – and I still can’t figure out how the carbon copies were subsequently bound.

Your’s truly working on this project – years ago.

I guess I was too busy doing the work, and ignored my intention to write about it as I went.

It has taken many many hours (years!), with white cotton archival gloves and a magnifying glass, to decipher the enormous volumes of writing and transcribe and translate them.

Now I’m excited to say, the end is in sight! I am now editing and doing some final translations.

Here is a very unflattering selfie of me triumphantly holding my manuscript!

The letters contain so many fascinating stories that no-one in our family knew about before.

The letters contain family history, the history of the textile industry in Peru and the businesses “El Progreso” and “La Union”, and an educated view of the social, political, and economic reality of life in Peru from the early 1900’s till the ’30’s.

But for me the most precious thing they contain is the feeling and essence of who my Grandfather George was.

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George_Bremner — My Grandfather, George W. Bremner

None of us, his scores of grandchildren, ever got to meet him, although he was the founder of our family’s new life as New Zealanders. We all adored his beloved Teenie, our dear Grannie, who played a huge part in all our lives. We only knew of him through stories, recollections and faded photos, but we always instantly recognised his face as one of ours. He died in Auckland in 1930, leaving Grannie to carry on raising their eight children in a foreign land, and we never even had a name for him, like Grandad, or Grandpa. For fifty more years Christina Bremner was our beautiful matriarchal link to our far-away family history in Scotland, Germany and Peru. For fifty more years, wherever she was staying, she always had his photo (above) on her bedside table. In 1980 she was buried beside him on a windy hilltop in Port Albert. She used to tell me “Never forget our bones came from Peru”.

But now, we can get to know our Grandfather personally. He left tomes of bound, rice-paper carbon-copies of all his correspondence from Peru, which were found in an old suitcase long after his death. The letters cover every aspect of his life in Peru from 1914 until 1926; his business life, the economic realities of the times, detailed social history snapshots of Peru, and our itinerant family’s personal stories, moving around in Peru, back and forth to Scotland, New Zealand, Germany, USA and Canada. These letters are very difficult to read, handwritten or typed, in both Spanish and English. I have been taking a long time to transcribe them and translate them, in order to preserve them for my family, and whoever may find them valuable. To me they are precious. Through them I have become very close to my wonderful Grandfather.

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