Of the Past

In my Richert Letters project, I came across a “Del Vaniman” mentioned in one of the letters from Julius. This was from his time in a forestry work camp during the war as a conscientious objector. These individuals, who took a moral stance against war, where put to work in projects like the CCC during the depression. An interesting footnote in our history of World War II.

As a lark, I started doing some research and found a photo of Del in a collection in the Lewis and Clark College Special Collections and Archive. It’s always such a rush to find something when doing research like this. The collection had photos from the actual camp my great-uncle Julius worked at for part of his time. I’ve already matched a couple of pictures to probable locations he mentioned and am excited at the prospect of more.

Which leads me to wonder, how much historical material is waiting to be discovered and put into context? The listing for this set of photos states that there are over 1300 individual pictures and just a fraction of them are online and available to those without physical access to the archive.  How many letters like ours could have added context and told a story using those pictures, but were discarded and lost for all time? Will future generations be able to recover more?

I think today’s forms of electronic communication will create new problems for the historians and researchers of the future. Many private communications will be lost as the medium used is not conducive to long term storage, but the numbers of records that ARE stored, like the thousands of governmental emails, could make finding the interesting kernels more difficult to find amongst the chaff. Hopefully, the computerization that stores them will help to search them.

I hope to find a descendant of Del to share the letter with and maybe fill in a little tidbit that might have escaped their family history. Though, I realize not all get very excited about genealogical details like that. Perhaps they have their own archive with a stash of similar letters and I have nothing new for them. In that case, I would love to see what they have about my relative.