A friend of mine who is deep into the task of clearing out the house she and her husband have lived in for some time and preparing for the “move to be nearer children” schtick—this friend mentioned having lots of old letters she was finding hard to just throw away. Why cart these letters across country just to hide them away in yet another attic corner? Why leave them for children or other relatives to deal with after the inevitable demise we all face?

Well, it is at least possible that these children or relatives might not have known the people who wrote the letters or at least did not know them well.  If that is the case, it might not be so hard for them to throw the letters away, or so you argue to yourself. But is there any reason besides your personal memories of the writers to save such letters? I’m sure we can think of several reasons.  Maybe you are lucky enough to have a family history buff among your relatives.  Or better yet, you may live in a town that really wants and saves any documents that could speak to local history.  My original hometown has an “Indiana Room” that collects such things.

However, chances are you see no really viable avenue for saving the actual artifacts themselves.  And this is a sad thing.  Examples of hand-written letters are becoming very scarce in today’s world of electronic communication.  Saving scanned copies of such letters is one option, though you may still need to find an archive of some sort that will store these electronic texts. But such scanned texts, perhaps in PDF form, could also be indexed with an eye for content relevant to local or institutional history—or even simply family records.

I’ll list some links below that you might find helpful:

https://postalmuseum.si.edu/preserving-your-letters-and-documents

https://www2.archivists.org/publications/brochures/donating-familyrecs

https://www.hyland.com/en/resources/terminology/data-capture/document-scanning-and-indexing-software#:~:text=Document%20indexing%20is%20the%20process,make%20search%20and%20retrieval%20easier.