Genealogy Chat

from the BBC news website http://news.bbc*co*uk/1/hi/magazine/4725729.stm

Conflicting emotions By Richard Allen Greene and Megan Lane From hand-written letters from the American civil war to e-mails from Afghanistan and Iraq, letters written during conflicts give great insight into life on the front lines - history, as recorded by soldiers and civilians. As war becomes ever more hi-tech, fewer and fewer people will have first-hand experience of a life lived on the front lines. The emotions experienced run the gamut from fear to excitement and even hilarity - and it is these emotions that are detailed in that most personal of missives, the letter to a loved one. These intimate messages are increasingly recognised as just as important a source of information as weighty research and official documents. And a new book, Behind the Lines, by US archivist Andrew Carroll, brings together correspondence as old as hand-written letters from the American Revolution and as fresh as e-mails from Baghdad. The way these are written are very much of their time, but the events and emotions experienced are universal.

I've got a hand written letter written by my dad during the ww2 to his mother-in-law, but it doesn't really say much apart from he is in a rotten place, well away from a town but near the sea. - nobody would be interested in that

We've got all of the letters written home to his family by my husband's uncle in WW1.He died just after the war ended when the ship SS LEINSTER was torpedoed and he was 18.What a waste of a young life along with so many,many others.It was touching to read his thanks for the homemade cakes and pies that were sent and of course the 'fags',and the home knitted socks and gloves lovingly made by his 3 sisters at home.