My girlfriend and I live a state away from each other, and I still have many great ways to stay connected with her. I can have a face to face conversation on Skype, mail little care packages back and forth, and we see each other's lives over Facebook. Even when I'm drilling in the field I can usually text or call her periodically.
As my friends who've spent several years in Afghanistan tell me, being away from family hurts. (As any 'welcome home' compilation on youtube demonstrates.) How long did soldiers (especially sailors) have to be away on campaign from their families? How did they stay connected to their loved ones? Did they send their pay home to support their families? Were 'home front' support networks common?
I'd really appreciate any and all information y'all have on this subject from ANY era.
Old airman here. If you really stop and think about it, it wasn't that long ago once a person left home there was great chance their family would never see them again or at least for years.
When I was in the Air Force, long before computers or even having phones in our dorm rooms, mail was very important.
When I was in Italy a phone call back to the states could costs as much as a dollar or even two dollars a minute.
We really looked forward to mail.
During WWII the amount of mail was so large the military had to photograph the mail, shrink it down and ship that overseas were it was enlarged and given to the soldier.
A good starting point for this would be researching the military mail service. For example, for the US, the Smithsonian National Postal Museum has a lot of information on it: http://postalmuseum.si.edu/mailcall/index.html
Internationally, here's a good page:
http://www.tafsc.com/PostalHistory.htm
You can go pretty deep on the postal/letter-writing angle with the American Civil War, when postage started getting cheap. But every new technology in the pre-computer era was used: telegraph, record-a-phonograph things during WW2, photos - my parents sent back and forth reel-to-reel tapes when my dad was stationed in Vietnam. Here's a good example from WW2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yChZpZupJWc
Another angle to look at is the role of nursing in the military. Specifically, Florence Nightingale was (I think) directly responsible for the British military instituting policies for soldiers to send home pay with money orders. (Mostly about combating drunkenness rather than morale.) Aside from just hygiene and recordkeeping, she was also very involved with the general well-being of troops, and she influenced pretty much every modern nursing operation after that.
It's hard to get a handle around her because she wrote so much in her lifetime (something like 200 volumes), but a good starter would be the Mark Bostridge biography from 2008.
There were times in history where they would bring family along on campaign. Specifically the Roman army would build forts in conquered territory and then thier family would come join them in thier new station.
Legions of Rome: The Definitive History of Every Imperial Roman Legion -Stephen Dando-Collins