Blessed Are The Peacemakers Small Histories During World War Ii Letter Writing And Family History Methodology Suzanne Kesler Rumsey by Suzanne Kesler Rumsey 9780817320904, 0817320903 instant download after payment.

I n the summer of 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, my paternal grandmother, Miriam, passed away. After the funeral I was given a lumpy cardboard box filled with letters, papers, odds and ends, and a fair amount of dust and grime. I was excited about the contents of the letters, and my immediate family and I read through a few on the top layer. I assumed that there were some love letters in the box, which would be fun and funny to read. I also assumed that there was a lot of junk in the box, given that my grandmother tended toward the Depression-era habit of saving absolutely everything. I then closed the box, put it on a shelf in my hall closet so that the cats could not get into it, and promptly forgot about it in the press of the academic cycle. As happens over and over in such stories, personal archives get stored and forgotten in attics and hall closets for indeterminate amounts of time. Thankfully, I remembered the letters only a year later. In the fall of 2014, I sat down with that lumpy cardboard box and began to gently unpack its contents in layers. First was a pile of letters loose on the top. Next, a packet of letters tied with string, a stationery box filled mostly with dust, some buttons and lace, tiny journals with one or two entries, and birthday cards. The next layer was . . . letters and more letters, hundreds of them. Some were tied in bundles, some not. I selected two or three to see what was inside. Each one was three to six pages of handwritten text, both front and back of the paper carefully filled. There were letters from Miriam to my grandfather Ben. There were letters from Ben to Miriam. And there were letters from people I did not know. Some came from my hometown, Goshen, in northern Indiana. Others came from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and, oddly, Rhode Island. Why on earth were there letters from Rhode Island? I wondered. Why were there so many letters? Was this before they were married?