Student finds letter 'a link to Jefferson'

by Babel-Fish | December 4, 2009 at 06:32 pm

189 views | 4 Recommendations | 0 comments

Nice find for a history student and the fact this very clever man was a humble being. To some he is like a God the man that never veto a bill in congress. The principle author of the Declaration of Independents. Others thought him a devil for promoting separation of church and state.

A man of many talents

(CNN) -- In a nondescript conference room tucked inside the library at the University of Delaware, a graduate student found a historian's equivalent to a needle in a haystack.

Amanda Daddona said she discovered a personal letter from Thomas Jefferson amid one of 200 boxes of legal documents, minutes from meetings and day-to-day correspondence of a prominent Delaware family.

"The first thing I recognized was his signature," said Daddona, 22, who is getting her master's degree in history. "It was really, really exciting. I just sat with it for a few minutes and looked it over and savored the moment."

Daddona found the letter last month in an unmarked folder among archives from the Rockwood Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. The archives, which the library received as a gift this year, contain the keepsakes and papers of the Bringhurst family, early members of Delaware's elite society.