Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction

During the Second World War, hundreds of New Brunswick woodsmen joined the Canadian Forestry Corps to log the Scottish Highlands as part of the Canadian war effort. Patrick "Pat" Hennessy of Bathurst was one of them. For five years, Pat served as camp cook with 15 Company of the Canadian Forestry Corps near the ancient town of Beauly, Scotland. A middle-aged New Brunswick farmer and lumberman with a third-grade education, Pat saw more of the world than he had ever dreamed of, visiting ancient battlefields he had learned about as a child, travelling to his ancestral Ireland, and attending a course of lectures in British history at Oxford University.

While in Scotland, Pat regularly corresponded with his family in New Brunswick. Drawing from this unique collection of more than three hundred letters, as well as hundreds of archival documents and photographs, Melynda Jarratt provides a rare glimpse of what life was like for Canadian servicemen overseas and for their relatives at home.

Letters from Beauly is volume 23 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, co-published with the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society.

Melynda Jarratt is internationally recognized as the leading expert on Canada's War Brides and is the author of three books on the subject. In 1995, Melynda wrote her master's thesis in history at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton on New Brunswick war brides, and went on to obtain a diploma in digital media and design in 1999. She has continued to document this fascinating chapter in Canadian military history for nearly thirty years. She is the co-author of Voices of the Left Behind(Dundurn Press, 2005), which was a Book of the Month Club selection, author of War Brides: The Stories of the Women Who Left Everything Behind to Follow the Men They Loved (Tempus Publishing, 2007; reissed by Dundurn Press, 2009), and of Captured Hearts: New Brunswick's War Brides (New Brunswick Miiltary Heritage Project and Goose Lane Editions, 2008). Melynda has also written on the history of Dutch immigration to Canada for Pier 21, and in 2012 she wrote the history of Bathurst's Brunswick Mines, entitled The End of an Era. Melynda has been the curator and outreach officer for the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame in Fredericton since 2012.

Melynda Jarratt's profile page

• Short-listed, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction

"Along with her previous book on war brides and war children, this work is part of a significant contribution made by Jarratt to our understanding of not only the lives lost, but the lives lived, during the Second World War."

<i>Atlantic Books Today</i>