Hands-On History

I have most of the contents of the bag of letters sorted now, grouped by language as well as content, and I'm nearly done transcribing and translating the first of the letters from Daniel to Emma. While as always, the Sutterlin script is making it a bit of a challenge, not to mention the water damage that's blurred the ink rather badly in spots, it doesn't take away from the awe factor of having a resource like this. Emma passed away a good decade before I was born and as a result, I only know about her from stories, so part of this project was to get a better sense of who she was and what her life was like. When I started hearing more stories about Emma, like how she saved up the money to emigrate or how she coped after her husband left, and later about her siblings from the time they were raising Oma and Rudi, those little pieces of the puzzle weren't enough for me and I wanted to know everything I could. That's why these papers are such a treasure, because they were all things that she made a deliberate decision to keep and that alone tells me a great deal about her. There are several letters to Emma from friends who were also German immigrants, though they wrote to each other in English (probably to improve their fluency), a letter and Mother's Day card from Oma's first husband Jimmie who died in 1950 when his plane crashed, and even one from Oma to Emma while Oma and Jimmie were stationed in Neubiberg, Germany. Oma describes their apartment in detail, but the fascinating part for me was when she talks about what it was like in post-war Germany, as it seems to have been a concern of Emma's. Given that Emma and Oma had a troubled relationship at best, it really touched me that Emma had kept that letter, and the next time I go see Oma, I want to bring it and see if she remembers writing it.

As for the letters from Daniel to Emma, it's a pretty extraordinary thing to have access to, let alone to be able to hold in my hands. I'm certainly no stranger to handling old documents, as the staff in the Rare Books room at Penn State can testify, but while I've always had a sense of awe when dealing with those, these letters are something different entirely. These are pieces of my family's history, answers to some of the questions I've had my whole life, and so the feelings are much deeper handling these than any of the centuries-old manuscripts I've dealt with in the past. The best way I can describe it is visceral, the sense that I'm reaching into the past and touching a piece of my family, and I now feel connected to them in ways I never thought I could. It's made me realise that I'm far more emotionally-invested in this than I expected, but it makes the break-throughs and the hunt itself even more rewarding.