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#WeSeeYouKSHB WWI Museum transcribing letters from soldiers, families

Posted at 6:50 PM, Apr 09, 2020
and last updated 2020-04-09 19:52:36-04

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Staying at home means we aren’t visiting our museums but in this devastating pandemic, the National World War I Museum and Memorial has found an opportunity to keep preserving history for all of us.

A team of 16 employees are working from home to transcribe 10,000 pages of hand written letters, journals, and diaries.

Stacie Peterson, exhibitions manager and registrar has been working for eight years to digitize the letters.

“We have them digitized so people can at least see the historic materials and some day we’ll get to transcribing them” she said.

Some day is now here.

Most of the team transcribing from home usually work in guest services at the museum. With the museum closed because of COVID-19 and no guests to help, people like Joe Saviano are working from home to transcribe the world’s personal stories of WWI.

“How do we take this crisis, which is so devastating for families and business right across the country and you know around the world, but how do we take this for good?” Matthew Naylor, PhD. President and CEO of the National WWI Memorial and Museum, said. “Being able to redirect our staff to this project is an exciting opportunity for us. It will take content that otherwise people would not have access to and make it available to families, to students, to high school kids to be able to use those primary source materials."

In April 1918, Charles Darby sent a letter to his mother before being honorably discharged. He described his battle wounds, how he “crawled to a shell hole out of the range of the firing and prayed for the ambulances to come.

“[I] made up my mind there that if I lived thru that I would be a better man in the future. I lay there in that wet field until 11 p.m. and then the Germans quit firing.”

He also talks about giving his mother the remainder of his soldier pay to help her pay for her house.

“But $6.50 went for a pair of shoes, which I knew I would need, so I haven’t[sic] spent but $3 what you might say foolishly,” he wrote.

“When we think about those who serve, we don’t really consider that they’re just like you and I,” Naylor said.

“It’s fascinating just the parallels we’re seeing between then and now,” Peterson said.

Like William Letts, who served aboard the USS Wyoming and wrote to his cousin in November 1918 that, “Yes the 'Flu' was pretty bad over here…” and, “In a city near here the deaths were over 200 a week for awhile.”

The CDC says the conditions of WWI helped spread the flu in the 1918 pandemic.

Naylor says the collection keeps growing with calls from all over the world every week.

“And we’ll go on for many years because these are important stories to be told," he said. "Every family’s story deserves to be told.”