I'm planning to include *some* images, but I cannot possibly include an
image for every letter. I'm about halfway through 1943 and already up to
letter #234 (and that's not actually the total because some of the envelopes
have several letters enclosed, so I've given them subnumbers). The images
I'll concentrate on are some of the more interesting letterheads (especially
some of "gag" stationery my mother used that became part of the family
legend of her and Dad's courtship) and some photos of the correspondents.
Most of the correspondents were really quite literate, especially my mother
(who was an English teacher); letter writing was a hobby for my dad, and he
didn't, apparently, bother to sustain a correspondence with anyone who
didn't write entertaining letters.
I'm adding quite a few notes as well, explaining family relationships,
giving capsule descriptions (from IMDB) of the movies mentioned, and so on.
The letters really provide a fascinating picture of life in the early '40s
and during WWII. Dad had gone to work for IBM when he graduated from
Vanderbilt in 1939, and he continued to work with IBM equipment (in a Mobile
Records Unit [MRU]) after he enlisted in the army in January 1942, so that
part is especially interesting.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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Post by CharacterPost by Suzanne S. BarnhillIt sounds incredibly complex. I think we are so accustomed to printed books,
which have normalized our writing patterns, that we're largely unaware of
the infinite variation that is possible in handwritten text, but we
intuitively know that the junk mail envelope that comes "hand addressed" is
actually machine printed because we recognize the uniformity of the
characters.
My current personal project is a transcription of a number of mostly
handwritten letters my father received between 1940 and 1945. I had to
decide at the outset that I would "flatten" them, making no attempt to
faithfully reproduce the variety of multiple underlinings, elongated dashes,
superscript numerals, etc., and just concentrate on content. Even so, it's a
real judgment call whether to supply the missing punctuation (many of the
correspondents had a very dashing script that omitted most apostrophes and a
lot of commas) or just let the correspondents appear illiterate. I'm still
trying to decide!
english almost phonetically - WITH his accent. Reading the original,
you can just about hear him speak!
If you include a high-resolution image of the original, the reader can
decide whether the originator was "illiterate" or just wrote fast.
I've tried to preserve the content of some old family documents, and
have included the image, a more or less accurately typed* copy, and
occasionally some notes to explain things that aren't otherwise clear.
After all, that's what they wrote.
*refers to an obsolete form of mechanically entering text on a page
- Ch.