Family Letters

My grandfather was one of 6 brothers all involved in different theatres of the First World War: one was in the navy at Jutland, another in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and the rest were scattered around France and India. They all wrote home to their mother who unsurprisingly kept their letters. In the course of time my mother inherited them.

In the 1970s my mother persuaded the Imperial War Museum to copy and transcribe the letters, and she then edited selections from the transcriptions and turned them into a book.

I contacted the IWM a year ago to discuss the idea of publishing them online between 2014 and 2018 in the form of a blog, each letter being published on the centenary of the day on which it was written. They are letting me have the transcripts, and I will raid family archives for photographs and other memorabilia which I will add as things go along.

The site is here so I can get started well ahead of 2014. It’s possible to schedule blog posts so they can be published on particular days, and I plan to automate as much ahead of time as possible. I must give my grateful thanks to the Imperial War Museum for the transcripts. The next task is to load them onto this site.

I will publish progress reports on the project between now and 2014, and then hand the site over to the project itself.

http://www.familyletters.co.uk