I have yet to come up with a catchy name for my project. When I do come up with a name I will start a separate blog, but for now I’m going to document here.

A few years ago my aunt let me have a handful of letters that were written between my grandparents while my grandfather was in the Navy during WWII. At the time I was excited to browse through them and maybe learn more about my family history. My aunt kept the remainder of the letters.

A year ago, I convinced her to entrust me with the rest of them. I was interested in reading through them, organizing them, and archiving them. I was pregnant with my first baby, which lent me a renewed interest in my family and the lineage that this baby was going to be born into, and I also wanted to put together this piece of our family history for her sake.

Well, it’s been a year, and I finally revisited this project again today. My first goal is to get the letters organized. I know I need to start big, with the general category, and work my way to the specific. I decided to start by organizing them by year, rather than by diving right in to the pretty big task of organizing them by date. I’ll work my way to organizing them by month, and then by date. I haven’t yet figured out how I will organize them by correspondence, so that they’re in order according to who replied to whom.

I feel like there’s a story here, just waiting to be told. Even the envelopes that the letters are in have stories to tell. Some came par avion, some domestic. Some bear stamps indicating that they were approved by the “mail censor”. Some stamps were 3 cents, some were 1.5 cents. Some have the fading ink of a fountain pen. There’s a lot of history in these envelopes.

Categories: Family History Project