[cletus]

I've recently been thinking about this since I've been going through family history.

So my great grandfather just decides to get on a boat in Latvia and sail to Australia. I'm really not sure why. He settles and sends for a bride. One comes. They've never met. They marry and have a bunch of children.

The wife's family is from Latvia and the Ukraine. She writes back and forth to her family over the next 20 years. I'm not sure what the latency is on communication here but I imagine at least 6 months, best case, more likely closer to 12. The last letter she received from her family was in 1937 and it was heavily censored. This of course being Stalin's USSR at this point.

Now it never really occurred to me that in this time there was such long lines of communication but in hindsight I guess there had to be because what was the alternative?

All of this was just a century ago too. Taking 6-12 months to communicate with family. Marrying an unknown bride. It's really quite bizarre.

Go back two centuries and it's even more surreal. One relative has a stated occupation of "scutcher". What's that you might ask? (I know I did). It's one of those English words that's now largely unknown and searching for it leads to a list of pre-Industrial Revolution jobs that don't exist anymore. A scutcher is someone who bashes flax seeds for linen fibers, a job later done by machines.

[dmd]

> sends for a bride

Can you expand on this a bit?

[acqq]

In some parts of the world it's still common that the (broader) families arrange who marries whom. The results are typically better than you'd believe (it "worked" so often that the custom survived through the centuries).