ANALYZING LETTER COLLECTIONS AND USING THE
ERASTUS SNOW FAMILY LETTERS TO ILLUSTRATE

©2011 by Donald R. Snow

Sections of the Class Notes This page was last updated 2011-05-26.
Return to the Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page , or Don's Class Listings Page .

    WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
  1. Instructors are Donald R. and Diane M. Snow ( snowd@math.byu.edu and dmsnow34@gmail.com ) of Provo and St. George, Utah.
  2. These notes with active Internet links are posted on the Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG, formerly the Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group, UVTAGG) website http://uvtagg.org under Class Outlines , Don's Listings . Many other class notes for family history are posted there also.
  3. This class will discuss finding and analyzing collections of personal and family letters, how to form a searchable database of them, and how to identify the people and places mentioned in them. A collection of the personal and family letters of Erastus Snow will be used to illustrate.

    4. LETTER COLLECTIONS
  4. Letters may be official, business, or personal -- we concentrate here on personal and family letters
  5. Family letters give insight into personal life, but only when some family members are away, whether on assignment, business, or pleasure
  6. Letters don't normally include events when everyone is home, except when referred to later, so they don't give a complete timeline of a person or family
  7. Your analysis may be skewed towards some family members since others may not have kept their letters
  8. Making people aware of your study may lead you to find other letters

    9. COLLECTING LETTERS
  9. Look through your own papers
  10. Spread the word to family members at family reunions or get-togethers
  11. Check libraries related to the person, his locality, religion, relatives, occupation
  12. Do searches online -- Google, National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) -- http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/ , historical societies, newspaper archives since sometimes letters are published as local news -- http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ , http://digitalnewspapers.org/ , http://pioneer.utah.gov/digital/utah.html , and http://www.mwdl.org/ (Mountain West Digital Library)
  13. Post information online and how to get in touch with you
  14. Make scans and/or photocopies so you are not working with the originals
  15. As you collect letters, indicate where you got them, so you can give credit later -- Libraries may be willing to grant you permission to publish them, if they understand the nature of your project.

    16. ORGANIZING AND SCANNING THE COLLECTION
  16. For hardcopies of the letters
    • Write in pencil in the upper right hand corner: the date and page, e.g. 1874-04-19 Page 1 of 3, and paperclip those pages together. If there is an envelope, include that.
    • Put the collection in order in some sort of binder without punching holes in them, e.g. use archival sheet holders in a notebook or put them in a spring-binder type folder
  17. For scanned copies of the letters
    • Scan with a flat bed scanner at about 300 dpi (dots per inch) resolution -- will allow using them to transcribe, print, or put them in slideshows later
    • Name the files by date and page of letter, e.g. 1874-04-19 Page 1, so the parts will sort together and in order and will be easy to locate on your computer

    18. TRANSCRIBING THE LETTERS
  18. Can use the freeware program Transcript -- http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm -- works like FamilySearch Indexing with image at top and panel to enter the text below
  19. Many people can help in transcribing, e.g. give copies to your family members to help
  20. Use file names such as "YYYY-MM-DD=From=[name and location]=To=[name and location]" -- use equal sign or another character so a text file formed from the file names can have the character replaced by a tab to get a tab-delimited file name list to import into a spreadsheet for analysis
  21. For help in reading old handwriting (paleography) there are good books and online resources
  22. For letters written on letterhead paper type in the words of the letterhead paper also since that gives clues to names and locations
  23. Store all the transcribed files in a folder and finish all the transcriptions before doing the final edit for corrections, clarifications, and identifications

    24. IDEAS FOR FINAL EDITING
  24. Have one person do all the final editing -- will make the work uniform and that person will see things in later letters to correct and clarify things in earlier letters
  25. Make notes of items of interest as you transcribe the letters or during final editing -- can record date of letter and short note about interesting items; save these in a text file to organize by topic later
  26. Add header to each page of each letter with the file name "YYYY-MM-DD=From=[name and location]=To=[name and location]" -- will help in viewing results later
  27. Check for typos and enter explanatory information -- one reason for editorial comments and corrections is so the text is readable and electronically searchable
  28. Put things that are not in original letter in square brackets [ ] -- is a standard editorial technique
  29. Need to balance correcting the spelling vs showing what original was like -- For major misspellings can include correct spelling in [ ] so it will be searchable -- for duplicate words and other errors use [sic]
  30. Type dates as they are in the letter, then include fuller version as [Sunday 13 Nov 1873] so they are uniform and searchable later
  31. To get day of the week for any month do a Google search for "calendar 1873" (without the quotes) and keep this open in a window as you edit the letter
  32. For explanations of locations use a format like [Salt Lake City, Utah] or {Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah]
  33. For people an explanatory format we have found helpful is [Georgiana Snow Thatcher 1862-1929] -- include full names after nicknames so readers will know who they are and they are searchable
  34. For information about people some helpful databases, parrticularly for LDS, are
  35. Can include Internet links inside the [ ] if person or location is particularly interesting or info was hard to find
  36. To form a spreadsheet of letter file names
    • Use a program to form a text file of all the file names in the folder -- Q-DIR is such a program
    • Replace the = signs by tabs in this text file by using a word processor -- gives a tab-delimited text file
    • Import this tab-delimited text file into a spreadsheet, e.g. Excel or LibreOffice -- the tabs make the data go into the appropriate columns
    • With the file names in a spreadsheet you can sort by date or From or To -- allows analyzing the dates, authors, and recipients and forming explanatory charts and graphs

    ANALYZING THE LETTERS AND TOPICS
  37. Letters help form a timeline of where people are -- can see their life in a context over the years covered
  38. Can use the spreadsheet of file names to generate bar graphs and pie charts of years the letters cover, authors, recipients -- shows the data visually
  39. Examine the text file of notes of interesting items and organize it into groups of major topics -- can use these groups for talks, classes, or papers and it gives a quick summary of what topics are discussed in the letters
  40. Put all edited letters in a single folder -- can then use a program that will search for words, phrases, or dates through multiple files -- one such program is DocSearcher -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/docsearcher/ -- very helpful to find occurences of names, dates, phrases, as well as to find typos

    41. CONCLUSIONS
  41. Letter collections give a summary of the life of the family, especially if one person was away a lot and the family wrote many letters
  42. Provides a database that can be searched for names, events, locations, etc.

    43. ASSIGNMENT
  43. Select an ancestor (parent? grandparent?) and see if you can find a few letters from or to them among your own papers.
  44. Xerox and/or scan the originals, label them, and put them in order.
  45. Transribe a few, so you learn how to do it efficiently.
  46. Identify some of the people, locations, and dates mentioned, and enter these in the transcriptions in square brackets [ ].
Return to the Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page , or Don's Class Listings Page .