Series 1 - Breen-Canning letters

2 sub-series

Philip Hudner of San Francisco directly provided Kerby A. Miller with transcripts of the Breen Canning letters, as well as 'A Short Sketch of the Lives of Patrick and Margaret Breen' (1937) by his ancestor, Henry J. Breen, and also permission to publish the letters per later of 18 August 1988. The original copies of these documents are among the Breen Family Papers located in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Materials related to the Breen-Canning letters. The Breen-Canning letters consists of typescripts and photocopies of six letters written to Patrick Breen (b. 1790) or his wife, Margaret (née Bulger) Breen (b. 1810), in San Juan Batista, California, between 1852 and 1869. Breen and his wife had emigrated from County Carlow to Upper Canada (Ontario) around 1818, later moving to the United States, and in 1846-47 went to California as members of the ill-fated Donner Party. The diary Patrick Breen kept during his family's journey to California with the Donner Party is the only known surviving journal kept during the trip. Three of the letters in this series were written by Breen's relatives in Missouri and Upper Canada, two by his childhood friend, John Canning, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and one was written by the priest of his widowed wife's Irish parish.