Series 3 - Personal correspondence

0.16 m of textual records

Personal correspondence among Coxeter family members along with their relatives document relationships formative in Coxeter’s life. There is extensive correspondence between Donald and Rien beginning with the courtship in the early 1930s and continuing sporadically whenever they spent time apart into the 1960s. There is also correspondence with the Coxeter children, Susan Coxeter Thomas and Edgar Coxeter, as well as with their grandchildren, at different stages of their lives.

Early correspondence between Donald and his parents and step-mother give insight not only into his family relationships but also into his early education at Cambrige and Princeton as well as his early years at the University of Toronto. These begin around 1930 and continue until his mother’s death in 1949.

Finally there is a set of Brouwer family correspondence consisting of letters to Rien from her family in Holland, parents and sisters Jeanne and Johanna as well as from her brother Piet and his family in South Africa. Most of these letters are in Dutch. Since Donald and Rien immigrated to Canada soon after their wedding in 1936 there is quite a lot of correspondence from the late 1930s and through the 1940s when Holland was occupied by Nazi Germany.

Correspondence is grouped together by correspondent and then arranged more or less chronologically.

B2004-0024/011, B20002-0023 (14)-(24) - Coxeter family (mainly Donald, Rien and children)
B2006-0023/002 (01)-(12) – Early correspondence with parents
B2004-0024/012 – Brouwer Family correspondence.

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