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tomorrow's history (was "approaching the grieving")



One of the elements of my previous job as Regional Archivist for ca. 1/9 of NY state was to raise people's awareness that history was not just something that happened a long time ago, but that things happening today are tomorrow's history. One example I used was, "You know how excited an archivist/historian gets today when they find a letter from a Civil War soldier? 100 years from now, people may get just as excited to find letters from a Gulf War soldier." This was influenced by that fact that my Army Reservist husband *was* a Gulf War soldier. Although I wasn't an archivist at the time, I saved his letters, and I now plan, at some point, to donate them to an appropriate archive.

I also had the opportunity to rescue family letters from my husband's family that came from a 90-year accumulation in the house built by his great-grandparents. We had the feeling that each time we visited his parents, there were fewer letters in the pile--that his mother might have been throwing away ones that she deemed "not important." I suggested to her that since they were going to be moving to a smaller condo in Florida, and since I was the family genealogist, I might help her out by taking them off her hands. At some point, I hope to transcribe them for distribution to various local history collections that might be interested.

Finally (forgive this personal reminiscence--I guess it's the Friday influence), last year my mother moved from a house she and my father moved into in 1976 when they retired to the US from 21 years in Saudi Arabia, and she found all sorts of things she had forgotten she had. One of them was a collection of all the letters my father wrote to us during the year when he was in Arabia before we went there (the year when I was five years old). She sorted them out and sent me all the ones he had sent to me personally--more or less one per week. It was quite an emotional experience to receive, 3 ½ years after my father's death, letters he had once written to me that I had completely forgotten. Except, as I thought about it, I remembered vaguely that there was something in them about cats, and finally, that one was about the "cat who went to kitten-garten" (written to allay my fears about starting kindergarten). It took me two days to work up the courage/energy to read them, and then I made sure I was alone in the house. He was writing, first, because he was afraid that at such a young age, I might forget him (I didn't), and second to let me (and my mother) know that we would find most of the amenities of home in the far-off land we were about to move to. It was a very moving experience to read them.

>>>Leslie Wagner <fiwagner@HOME.COM> 05/25/00 10:21PM >>>
Fellow listers:

I am attempting to compose a letter to the families of two former
employees.  Both were exceptional nurses and we have named our nursing
excellence awards for them.  While one doesn't want to encroach on the
family's grief, the sooner the better.  Even before my maternal
grandmother's funeral, my dad was tossing out her belongings right and
left.  She had kept family letters from the 1950s, maybe even the 1940s
(I remember the purple V stamps on them).  I also do the family
genealogy, and I kick myself often when I think of those letters.  I
also regret having tossed out the letters my husband and I wrote each
other when he was stationed in Vietnam, but at the time we wanted to put
a difficult time of our lives behind us.

Not only could we use some lessons on communication, it would also help
if we educated the public on the potential importance of family papers.
It's not just for presidents anymore!

Leslie Wagner



du>

Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

(note change of address as of May 2000)
Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(914) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

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