Other People's Letters

Each weekend, I try to visit a fleamarket near my apartment called "The Garage."  On weekdays, it's a parking garage.  On weekends, it is transformed into a multi-tiered fleamarket with vendors who never fail to amaze me at what different things they can bring each week.

I have 2 huge (as in book-like) research projects that have been keeping me really busy.  One is generally about the homefront during World War II, and the other focuses on NYC history during the 1800s.  Not much overlap.  But, anyway, I've been using my visits to the Garage to look for source material or stuff (I try to be open-minded since you never know what you might see) that might be useful to better understand each of these time periods.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite vendors promised to bring a box of letters from WWII that he had found at an estate sale in upstate New York.  As soon as I saw the heaping box of unorganized letters, I knew I had to buy it.  After several hours of organizing and cataloging them by date, I can now read through them in the order they were written.

The box of letters after I organized them

It seems a little sad to me that I, a stranger, now have the personal letters of this couple.  I can't help but wonder if they had children who didn't care to keep the letters, or perhaps it was their grandchildren who were willing to part with them?  As I organized the box, I felt even sadder, since I discovered that there are photographs, and even Mr. Allan W. Ames's Navy id card mixed in.

A photo of Mr. Ames--I assume with his wife and mother--either as he was about to leave for service, or perhaps while on a furlough:

And these just scratch the surface....  I have an entire envelope of photographs (here are just a few):

As well as notepads that Mr. Ames carried with him during the war, jotting down notes along the way...

I know not everyone feels the same way about old letters as I do, but my plan is to share parts of the story behind Mr. Ames' war service on this blog, and also what his wife was up to with her War Bond work and adjusting to the homefront as rationing took effect and other wartime measures were taken that made life very different from what it had been.

I wonder what happens to other boxes of old letters--whether some are just thrown away and lost forever.  Wouldn't it be incredible if there were a Museum of Abandoned Letters, a repository for boxes like the one I just bought, where letters too precious to throw away (and perhaps too precious to even sell) could be stored and read by curious visitors wondering what life was like at some other point in time?