The microfilm of the Samuel Relf Collected Correspondence and Biographies includes letters from William Poyntell to his wife, and letters from William Tayler to Samuel Relf. The ten Poyntell letters date from July 4, 1802 to June 23, 1803. They were written while Poyntell traveled through western Europe on a trip apparently undertaken for pleasure only. However, in one letter Poyntell mentioned sending a sixty-to-seventy page dispatch (his journal?) describing his impressions of Europe to his son-in-law, Samuel Relf. The latter document was not with the letters in this collection when it was loaned to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for microfilming, but it is certain that the news from Europe in Poyntell's letters to his wife was intended to be used by Relf for publication. In the letters preserved here, Poyntell described his various travel experiences in detail as he moved through England, Scotland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. The correspondence is not complete; there are references in the letters to other letters not in the collection. Poyntell's persistent misspellings of French and German place-names indicate his unfamiliarity with languages other than English, and although he visited the usual points of interest and talked to prominent citizens, he seemed to have slight understanding of, or sympathy with, the societies of which they were part. He was scandalized in Brussels to find people playing cards on Sunday; and showed no empathy for French life, as when he wrote: “It [Paris] is all very well to see but give me the quiet and simple scenes of America in preference to all the splendor and dissipations of Europe.” Despite the shortcomings of the letters, something of the spirit of Europe at that time has been preserved. Poyntell's correspondence may well be valuable, because so few Americans were abroad and recording their impressions at that time.
The ten Tayler letters date from July 1, 1801 to March 18, 1807. Judging from the references within them, they constitute only a fraction of the total correspondence between the two men. The letters were reports on current political, military, and naval developments in Europe and were meant for publication in the National Gazette. Since all of Tayler's dispatches originated from London and were the products of second-hand information-gathering, they often show only superficial knowledge and perception of the processes underlying the events. A week before the Battle of Trafalgar, Tayler was discounting the possibility of renewed war in Europe, probably an understandable misreading of the situation considering the difficulties of diplomatic reporting. Tayler's correspondence is perhaps valuable less for the information contained therein than for revealing something of the journalistic methods and standards of the time.
The handwritten biographical sketches of Ann Relf Kemper, Bishop Jackson Kemper, Sarah Poyntell Relf, Samuel Relf, Anne Wilcocks Poyntell, and William Poyntell, which follow the letters on the microfilm, were written in 1972 by Samuel Relf Durand, a descendant of William Poyntell and Samuel Relf, and are accompanied by photographic copies of portraits by Rembrandt Peale of Samuel Relf and William Poyntell.
