So, I’d rescued the 300+ letters from my mother’s garage and now was the steward of my Uncle Glenn’s memory.  What now?  I had no idea what I was going to do with them, long term.  The idea of spending several years preserving, transcribing and publishing them was definitely not the plan.  But I knew they had to be saved

My first thought was to protect and preserve until I could figure out a plan.  The letters were almost all in their original envelopes.  Just by handling them to organize and separate the letters by postmark, was causing damage.  There were some without envelopes and those started falling apart right away.  There were small pieces of brittle paper all over the place.  It was nerve raking because I knew I was losing information that could be important.

With them now organized, I needed to come up with a solution to protect and preserve these stacks letters.  My “semi-brilliant” solution was to vacuum seal them.  I thought – It works for meat, so….  I know now that I should have put them in a hard container and then sealed them, so as not to crush the stack so severely.  But, I’m learning, and I don’t think any terrible damage was done.

When complete I had eighteen sealed packages of lettters, seperated by the months he had served.  February 1943 – July 1944.  As time permitted, I would open one month at a time and and begin the process of removing each letter from the envelope, unfold each page to flatten it, so that it could be scanned on a flatbed scanner.  Because of the delicate condition of the letters, each page had to be placed on the scanners platten – scanned and flipped over to scan the other side.  When finished, they were left flat and re-sealed between ridged acid-free boarders to preserve and protect them permanentley.  The total was of over 2000 scanned images.  This process took approximatley two years to complete. 

At this point, I thought I was at a stopping point.  The letters were preserved.  The information was captured.  The memory of my Uncle Glenn will be honored.  Family members, both present and future generations could read thru the letters he left behind.  Or could they.  As previously mentioned, my uncle had, less than eligant penmanship.  It soon became obvious to me that it wouldn’t be enough to just preserve the letters, they were too difficult to read.  A daunting task lay ahead.

If not me, Who ?

Be Swell              
Marty Whitacre