Digitizing (read preserving) the Past

Man, did May ever fly by! I didn't realize that I'd gone a month again without posting. Here's a preview of things to come, albeit that they will come VERY slowly, merely because of the nature of the work. Of course, my pace probably doesn't help. Here's the list though.

Digitization of Letters:
I've digitized one letter on here from 1920, this is the plan for those to follow.

As I embark on the long, but necessary journey of digitizing and transcribing my grandparents’ letters and letters of older generations (what few I have), I want to note a few observances regarding the letters.

First, I intend to digitize into *.jpeg format each of the letters into files in which each of file will be named for the date the envelope was postmarked denoted as follows 1957.06.01 pm. A date/file name without the ‘pm’ indicates that there was a letter, but no envelope.

I will try to get them organized in related segments/events, and then of course by date. My goal, ultimately, will be to have all of them digitized and typed. As best I can, I will digitize and type the older ones first.

The letters generally will fall into the following groups.

Pre-1940
Most of these fall into the WWI era time frame with one coming just after the war in 1920 (which has already been digitized and transcribed) and a group of letters having been written from a family in France who had befriended Edward Gordon Ponder and kept up correspondence with his youngest sister Dollye Elizabeth Ponder Thompson, Mme. Guiggard and her daughter according to the letters. The spelling is the best interpretation/transcription I can decipher.

Military letters:
Most of these that I will publish will be from WWII, so as to maintain the standard that the primary writers are no longer living, to protect identity, etc. as much as possible. The bulk of these letters were written from Allen Vernon Tuten to his parents Joseph Alexander and Ruth Rogers Tuten. I will also scan and transcribe a journal that one of A. V. Tuten’s crew-mates kept regarding their missions in Europe. There are a few letters that Marguerite Elizabeth Thompson, while in boot camp, wrote to Ralph and Naomi ‘Jane’ Bowden. There are a few military documents as well that I will scan and include.

1957
These letters were written while Robert Harold Clinton & Marguerite Elizabeth Thompson Clinton, referring to each other as Baja and Tommy or Tombone respectively through out the letters, were living apart from each other between May 1957 and Sept. 1957. Baja was in Norwalk, California writing to Tommy and their children in Watkinsville, Georgia and vice versa. Unfortunately, the letters for the month of July that Tommy wrote to Baja are currently missing, and likely lost to posterity. All of the letters written from Baja to Tommy, to my knowledge are accounted for.

While writing to each other during this time, they rarely missed a day of writing, and the letters that I have read thus far have been descriptive of their days and especially full of love for each other and almost disconsolate longing and loneliness while apart.

For each set of letters, mistakes within the letters will be kept as is with the typical notation of [sic] after each.

I will try without too much commentary to let the letters speak for themselves. When narration is necessary or beneficial, I will provide it.

AFN
DCC
Athens, GA 4 June 2009
Rainy