LETTER COLLECTIONS WITH ERASTUS SNOW'S
FAMILY LETTERS AS AN EXAMPLE
©2020 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2020-05-19.
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Abstract: Letters give different
insights into a family than journals or official
documents, but of course only give information
when some member of the family is away so people
are corresponding. My family has compiled,
edited, transcribed, and posted online more than
200 family and personal letters of Erastus Snow.
This presentation will show how we found and
worked with the collection, the freeware programs
we used, how we titled the letter files so they
are easy to find and search, and interesting
things we learned about Erastus Snow and his
family from them. The notes for this class,
as well as related information in other classes and articles, all with active web
links, are posted at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
- Instructor is Donald R. Snow (snowd@math.byu.edu)
of Provo and St. George, Utah.
- The notes and related articles and classes, all with active internel links, are posted at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html .
- Tips: (1) To put an icon on your
desktop for these notes, or any webpage, just
drag the icon from in front of the address in
your browser onto your desktop.
(2) To open a link, but keep your place
in these notes, hold down the Control key
while clicking the link.
- The problem for today: How to compile and
work with a collection of letters and learn
interesting things from them.
ABOUT OUR ERASTUS SNOW FAMILY LETTER
COLLECTION
- Erastus Snow --> Erastus Beman Snow
--> Eldon Stafford Snow --> Donald Ray
Snow
- Don's Dad, Eldon Stafford
Snow, grew up in St. George, Utah and knew his grandfather, Eratus Beman Snow, but not his great grandfather, Eratus Snow, but some old letters have come down to us from those families.
- Our Erastus Snow letter collection
- Several hundred photocopies of letters to and
from him
- We have only worked on the family
letters, not his official church nor
business correspondence
- Our sources have been family, libraries such as the Church History Library, BYU
Special Collections, U of U Marriott
Library, Utah State Historical Society, and newspapers
- Have given all originals we had to
libraries for preservation
- Still need to determine sources of some
letters and some are in typed form passed down in the family and we don't
know where the originals are
- Our famiy has transcribed more than 200 famiy letter, but much editing is still needed to identify
individuals and places mentioned
- Transcriptions are posted on Don's website
(above) and are every-word searchable -- see
the Google search box at top of Don's FH
Notes Page
- More details on this are in other notes and
articles on Don's webpage
SOME INTERESTING EXCERPTS FROM THE LETTERS
- 1856-05-31 - Artimesia (SLC) to Erastus (St
Louis) - resigned to living alone since
Erastus traveling until he dies
- 1851-06-24 - Erastus (Liverpool) to
Artimesia (SLC) - talking via letters, takes
10 months to get answers
- 1885-07-19 - Erastus (Mexico City) to
Elizabeth (StG) - keep all my letters since
not writing a journal
- 1851-04-06 - Erastus (Copenhagen) to
Artimesia (SLC) - pleasant visits with Joseph
Smith in his dreams
- 1860-11-18 - Erastus (St Joseph, Missouri)
to Elizabeth (SLC) - telegraph wires to go
from Nebraska to SLC, if "Union don't burst
up" [Civil War]
- 1886-10-11 - Erastus (Mexico City) to Edward
H. Snow (mission in Virginia) - about how
Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon
with Seer Stone
- 1868-01-25 - Erastus (SLC) to Elizabeth
(StG) - shudders at thought of returning to
StG like a "sore back horse at the sight of
the saddle"
- 1851-04-06 - Erastus (Copenhagen) to
Artimesia (SLC) - "the old cow did not eat up
the grindstone"
- 1851-04-06 - Erastus (Copenhagen) to Minerva
(SLC) - "keep the light side of the picture
up"
- 1884-03-14 - Erastus (Milford) to Elizabeth
(StG) - "busy as a ________ and happy as a
________ in _________"
- 1855-01-14 - Erastus (St. Louis) to Family
(SLC) - offers bribes to get the kids to learn
- 1881-03-14 - Erastus (Colorado) to Elizabeth
(StG) - hopes someone will teach Herbert how
to write better
- 1887-02-11 - Erastus (Mexico) to Edward H.
Snow (mission in Virginia) - about Julia
spending too much
- 1884-07-21 - Erastus (SLC) to Elizabeth
(StG) - Arthur has to get his homework done to
be able to go to the ranch
- 1882-12-22 - Minerva (StG) to Erastus
(Arizona) - about death of Artimesia
STEP 1: COMPILE THE LETTER COLLECTION
- Letter collections only discuss events and
family life when someone is away -- hence not a complete picture
- Collections are never complete and you may find others later; you don't usually know if some were destroyed,
inadvertently or on purpose
- For an ancestor you may find
that family members have letters or copies of
them
- Look in libraries and archives,
especially near where the person lived or that
would apply to the person, e.g. Church History
Library
- May find letters published in
newspapers, especially small-town newspapers,
e.g., St. George, Utah newspapers published
letters from U.S. Army soldiers during WW I -- example of Don's Dad, Eldon
Stafford Snow's letters in the Washington
County Times newspaper during WW I in France
and Germany
- For Utah newspapers the
website http://digitalnewspapers.org/ by University of Utah Marriott Library; financed by grant from Library of
Congress to digitize all Utah newspapers -- not
complete yet, but is a major source now,
completely searcchable ; other states have similar websites
- Keep track of where you find
the letters for atributionn and permission
later, if needed
STEP 2: SCAN THE LETTERS
- Scan the letters
so you can work with scans and not the
originals -- donate originals to a library so
they will be preserved
- Family History
Centers have good scanners and most have
settings to even remove some of the background
splotches, e.g. the Lexmark scanners -- go to
Settings and turn on Remove Background; I
didn't discover this until after I had scanned
all my own missionary letters and found some
were unreadable without removing the ink
bleed-through from the back.
- Scan them to a
flashdrive and rename the files when you get
home -- see below
- I recommend
scanning to pdf (Portable Document Format) at
about 150-300 dpi (dots per inch) -- pdfs are readable
by many free programs
- If photos
are included, or if it is from a newspaper and
has pictures, scan at higher resolution -- rule of thumb from the
Library of Congress: Scan at about 250
dpi for each inch of the final
product -- so scanning a 2x3 inch
photo to print at 4x6 inches
(twice the size), scan at 500 dpi; scan a 1 inch high slide to show at
10 inches high at 10 x 250 = 2500 dpi;
otherwise you get pixelation (breaking up into
little squares) when looking at it
larger
- Newspapers are
already about the size you want later, so
scanning at 150-300 dpi works well -- some
scanners have newspaper settings to remove
some of the background lines in newsprint
- If there is color,
scan in color; otherwise scan in black and
white.
STEP 3: TRANSCRIBE THE LETTERS
- With the letters
scanned you can show them in various programs
to transcribe them -- There is no program yet
to transcribe the handwriting, so you have to do it
yourself -- various ways to do this
- Transcribing by
reading aloud -- use a voice recorder on your
smartphone or computer and read the letters,
saying "period", "comma", etc. -- works OK,
but then needs lots of editing later and for
me that takes as much time as typing them in
the first place
- Transcribing by
using a program like TRANSCRIPT-- https://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm
Free for personal use and has a panel to show the scanned image
and a panel to type what you read;
will not transcribe handwriting; you have to
type what you see; works well and when you
press Return, it moves the image down, too.
- Can type the
lettters into a program like EVERNOTE -- https://evernote.com/
-- free version; helps organize them and will
sort them in order, if you label them
correctly; can then export them into various
formats, including html (hypertext markup
language which is computer jargon) for posting on a
website
- Type each
letter into a separate file or note so you can
move and/or correct them more easily and automatically insert new letters where they belong
chronologically by just naming them correctly
- Computer
scientists are working on transcribing
handwriting, but it's not there yet
STEP 4: NAMING THE FILES
- File naming is the key to
sorting and finding what you are looking for
- My system -- more details in
other classes and articles on my website http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
- Example:
ESLETTER-1884-09-03-From,SnowErastus,MissouriStLouis-To,BemanArtimesia(Snow),UtahStGeorge
.
- ESLETTER at the start makes
these all sort together; the date in
International Date Format YYYY-MM-DD makes
them sort in chronological order regardless of
when you transcribed them; the locations and
people make it so you can find what you want
- Naming system works in general
files or in a program like EVERNOTE
- The freeware program
EVERYTHING, available from http://voidtools.com/
, will find, sort, and show all files on your
computer, regardless of folder, in order so
these all sort where they belong
- EVERYTHING can be used to move
files or edit file names, if needed
- If the collection is moved
into a separate folder, they will be
sorted there in chronological order without
EVERYTHING
STEP 5: EDITING AND SEARCHING THE
FILES
- Correct typos whenever you see them, since
you may not be able to find them later.
- Add editorial comments in square brackets
[...] such as correct spellings of names or
locations, so they are findable and add
information about words, e.g. EB in Erastus
Snow's letters refers to Erastus Beman Snow
(1853-1900) -- this makes the terms findable
- Many mispelled words don't need correcting
since they won't be searched for and are clear
from the context.
- The freeware
program EVERYTHING will search for words
in the titles of files, but not in the
text
- To search for text content several free programs are
available; one is FREE COMMANDER
from http://freecommander.com/en/summary/
-- In FREE COMMANDER select the folder or
files you want to search through and click
File > Search (or just CTRL+F), fill in
the information and press Enter.
Press ESC to stop or when finished.
Clicking on any of the found file names
will open the program they need and show
them. It does not show a snippet
around the search terms and that would be
helpful. The only way I know to
highlight the search terms in the file is
to use CTRL+F in the program that opened
the file.
STEP 6: ANALYZING THE FILES AND
ITEMS OF INTEREST
- Make a note of
interesting things when you see them, e.g.
a short note about it and the letter
date; can compile these and sort them
into categories later
- The interesting item list for Erastus
Snow has hundreds of items which I
categoried later into things like Family
Life, LDS Church History, Health and
Physical Well-Being, Sayings of the Times,
etc.
- Analyzing the collection
-- What they tell us
- Glimpses into the lives, events,
and personalities of the people --
only a partial history of the family
since only written when someone was
away
- Provides a database
that can be searched for names,
events, locations, etc.
- Provides a timeline of the location of family members
- Preserves things like reactions to
historical events, language, and
sayings of the times
- May lead you to
family history
information about other
family members mentioned
USING EVERNOTE FOR A LETTER
COLLECTION
- EVERNOTE is a program
that I use, so here are helps using it
- Set up an EVERNOTE notebook for the
letter collection
- Put the letters as named above in the
notebook and they sort chronologically
- EVERNOTE indexes all text in any note,
so they are searchable automatically
- To print them all highlight the
collection and press Print; can print
them to hardcopy or pdf
- To export them to post online, for
example, use the Export command and save
them to separate html files (computer jargon); you get a folder
with all the files and an index file to
click to go to any one; it runs in your browser and
looks like you are online, but you are
only on your computer
- Looking at them in this format helps
find additional typos and corrections
needed; be sure to correct them in the
original EVERNOTE file, not just the
exported html file
- In html format the CTRL+F Find Command
in browsers works to search for anything in the collection
- The html files are ready to post
online, if desired.
- EVERNOTE has a
"Presentation" mode in the commercial
versions. To see a single note in
presentation mode just click on the
Projection Screen icon at the top-right
of the note. To see a collection
of notes in presentation mode, highlight
them all, right click, and select
Present, or click on the Start
Presentation button below. You
will see the notes in full-screen with
larger text so it shows up well on a
projector or even just on a computer
monitor for several people to
watch. The mouse wheel, the arrows
down and up, and the Pages down and up
buttons move you down and up through a
note. When showing several notes,
CTRL+(Right Arrow) or CTRL+(Left Arrow)
takes you to the next or previous
note. When you reach the last
note, it cycles back to the first note
you highlighted. The ESC key takes
you out of presentation mode. This
is a simple way to show the notes
without having to export them from
EVERNOTE, but it is not available in the
free version.
- To view and search the Erastus Snow
letters on my website I have set it up so
you can do Google site-searches by
clicking on the Google Search link at the
top of my website and entering the search
terms -- see the "Click Here To Google
Search" note at the top of my
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
.
CONCLUSIONS
- Letter collections can be a major source
of family history information and provide
interesting glimpses into the lives of you
or your ancestors.
- They are a major
step in "turning your heart to your
fathers".
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