LETTER COLLECTIONS USING ERASTUS SNOW'S FAMILY
LETTERS AS AS EXAMPLE
©2016 by Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2016-05-28.
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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 got and worked with the collection,
the freeware programs we used, how we titled the
letter files to make them easy to find and
searchable, and interesting things we learned about
Erastus Snow and his family from them. The
notes for this class, as well as related information
in Don's Freeware Corner and other articles, all
with active web links, are posted at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
- Instructors are Donald R. Snow (snowd@math.byu.edu)
of Provo and St. George, Utah and his daughter
Linda Snow Westover (linda.westover@gmail.com)
of Orem, Utah.
- The notes and related additional information
in other article is posted at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
, all with active Internet links.
- 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 problems for today:
- How to compile and work with a collection
of letters
- Example: What we learned about Erastus
Snow and his life and times from his
personal and family letters
ABOUT OUR ERASTUS SNOW FAMILY LETTER
COLLECTION
- Erastus Snow => Erastus Beman Snow =>
Eldon Stafford Snow => Donald Ray Snow =>
Linda Snow Westover; Don's Dad,
Eldon Stafford Snow, was in first graduating
class of Dixie College, 1913, St. George, Utah
- Collection is of several hundred letters to
and from Erastus Snow and his families; we work
with photocopies; have transcribed about 225
personal and family letters (several hundred
single-spaced typed pages); still have more than
300 business, official, and LDS Church letters
to transcribe
- Sources of originals where transcriptions are
posted online
- Have given all our originals to libraries
for preservation
- Have copies of letters from -- BYU
Special Collections, Church History
Library, U of U Marriott Library, Utah State
Historical Society, etc.
- Still need to determine sources of some
letters; have some in typed form passed down
in the family with no copies of the originals
- Much editing still needed to identify
individuals and places
- 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 our procedures in other notes
and articles on Don's webpage
- Letter collections only discuss events and
family life when someone is away, so not a
complete history of the family, but Erastus Snow
was away a lot
- Letter collections are never complete since
there may be many others, some may not have been
saved, and some may have been destroyed on
purpose.
A FEW 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
STEPS IN WORKING WITH A LETTER COLLECTION
- STEP 1: COMPILE THE LETTER
COLLECTION
- Family members may already have letters,
so ask for copies
- Check libraries and archives near where
they lived or in organizations they were
associated with
- Check newspapers, especially small-town
newspapers, since when someone wrote back
home, it was of local interest; examples are
letters from people in the military -- I've
found some letters from my Father during WW
I published in the Washington County (Utah)
Times -- for Utah newspapers the
website http://digitalnewspapers.org/
is based on a grant that the Library of
Congress has given the University of Utah
Library to digitize all Utah newspapers; all
are OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) so
are completely searchable
- Keep track of where you found the letters
so you can atribute them correctly later.
- STEP 2: SCAN THE LETTERS
- Family History Centers have good scanners
(Lexmark) that scan directly to a flash drive
- I scan letters to pdf (Portable Document
Format) at 150 dots per inch; pdf format makes
them viewable by many free programs and easy
to work with; if photos are included I scan at
higher resolution
- Library of Congress rule of thumb; scan at
about 250 dots per inch of original to get the
inches you will want in final product; since
you want letters and newspaper articles to be
about same final size, scan at 150-250; for
slides, which are about 1 inch high, to print
at 8 x 10 inches, you need to scan at 8 x 250
= 2000 dpi, at least, and I usually scan
slides at even higher resolution, so they
project well on screen; scanning at too low a
resolution leads to pixilation (breaking up
into little squares).
- STEP 3: TRANSCRIBE THE LETTERS
- Once scanned, the simplest way to transcribe
the letters is just to read the scans and type
what you see into a text editor.
- Using EVERNOTE -- available from https://evernote.com/
; can set up a notebook for each collection of
letters and type each letter into a separate
note; keeps them all together and makes them
easy to sort, find, and search
- Using voice recognition software -- read the
letter aloud and it converts to text, but my
experience has been that it needs so much
editing afterwards that it is easier to type
them in to start with
- Freeware program TRANSCRIPT -- http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm
-- works like FamilySearch Indexing where you
see the image at the top and a place to type
the information below; as you type and press
the Return key at the end of the line, it
moves the image for you.
- People are working on handwriting
recognition programs, but not available yet
- STEP 4: NAMING THE FILES
- This is the key to being able to sort and
find the letters you are looking for.
- System I have developed -- more information
and details in other notes and articles on my
webpage
- Example of the name I would give to an
Erastus Snow letter
ESLTR-1884-09-03-From,SnowErastus,MissouriStLouis-To,BemanArtimesia(Snow),UtahStGeorge
- ESLTR (abbreviation for Erastus Snow
Letter) adds a code at the start so these
letters all sort together.
- Date of the letter is next and written in
International Date Format of YYYY-MM-DD, so
an alphabetical sort makes them sort
chronologically, no matter what order you
type them in
- The From and To formats make it so that I
can easily find all letters from or to an
individual and also sort on those locations.
- Locations are written from largest
jurisdiction to smallest, so everything from
each country or state sorts together.
- I leave no spaces since some programs put
characters such as % in place of spaces and
they become harder to read
- EVERNOTE sorts these in chronological
order and they are automatically backed up
to my online account and are available on
any of my computers
- For text files on a computer the freeware
program EVERYTHING, available
from http://voidtools.com/
, finds, sorts, and shows them in
chronological order, no matter which
folders they are in, and you can list by
person, location, date, etc., or move them
elsewhere with it
- STEP 5: EDITING
- Finding typos and adding editorial comments
is a never-ending process
- Put editorial comments in square brackets,
e.g. [.......], so people can tell it was not
in the original letter; my editorial comments
are of full name of person, location, event,
etc., and current name of event, e.g. Civil
War, since it wasn't called that at the time,
so they are recognizable and electronically
searchable.
- STEP 6: LIST OF INTERESTING THINGS FROM
THE LETTERS
- For things to remember I write a short
statement starting with the letter date and
describing the item. For example, when
Erastus Snow wrote that he wondered if the
"Union was going to burst up" (Civil War) I
wrote a note that said something like
"1860-MM-DD - Erastus wonders if Union will
burst up - Civil War" and add that to a list
of Interesting Items. Or when he offers
bribes to get his children to study their
geography, I wrote "1871-MM-DD - Erastus
offers his map to first child to learn the
capitals of the U.S. states."
- My list of interesting things from the
letters is hundreds of items long; I
categorize them later, e.g. Family Life, LDS
Church History, Health and Physical
Well-Being, Sayings of the Times, etc., and
copy the excepts into the categories for
articles, talks, and classes.
- STEP 7: EXPORTING THE LETTERS FROM
EVERNOTE
- In EVERNOTE I form notebooks for the various
letter collections
- To export from EVERNOTE use the Export
command and save them to separate files in
html format (computer jargon); this forms a
folder of all the files selected with an
"Index" file showing all their names; clicking
on the Index file opens the default browser
and brings up the html index file; clicking on
the title of any letter opens it to view in
the browser; looks like you are on the
Internet, but it is just in a browser on your
computer.
- When I find more typos, I correct them in my
EVERNOTE collection, so the next time I export
it includes the corrections
- STEP 8: SEARCHING THE FILES
- In EVERNOTE you can search them anytime for
any word anywhere; can also add tags to help
sort
- After exporting from EVERNOTE, to search the
file names on my own computer, I use
EVERYTHING. This allows finding all
letters that have certain criteria or dates or
who to or from or locations in their titles.
- To search for words inside the files, after
exporting from EVERNOTE, there are freeware
programs that help, e.g. FREE COMMANDER
from http://freecommander.com/en/summary/
; in FREE COMMANDER click File > Search (or
just CTRL-F) and you get a screen with search
boxes for titles or for content. To
search the content of all files in a folder,
enter the name of the folder and include
subfolders, if desired. Then enter the
search terms in the content box, do the
searches, and you see the titles of all files
containing those search terms. Click on
a file title to open it. The only way I
have found to get the search terms highlighted
with FREE COMMANDER is to click on CTRL-F and
type in the search terms again.
- To search the Erastus Snow letters posted on
my website go to the top of any of my pages
and go to the "Click Here To Google Search"
note at the top of my webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
.
- STEP 9: VIEWING THE FILES IN EVERNOTE
- EVERNOTE (commercial version) has a
"Presentation" mode
- Click on the Projection Screen icon at the
top-right of the note; to see a whole
collection in presentation mode, highlight
them all, right click, and select Present, or
click on the Start Presentation button below;
the full screen view and larger text shows up
well on a projector or even just on a computer
monitor
- To move up or down in a note use the Mouse
wheel, the arrows down and up, and the Pages
down or up buttons
- To move to another note when showing several
use CTRL+RightArrow or CTRL+Left Arrow; when
you get to the last one, it cycles back to the
first note; ESC key takes you out of
presentation mode.
- Projection mode is a simple way to show the
notes without having to export them, but is
not available in the free version of EVERNOTE
ANALYZING LETTER COLLECTIONS
- Can sort and count numbers from and to
individuals, locations, etc.
- Gives a partial timeline of where people were
at given times
- Gives glimpses into the lives, events, and
personalities of the people, but is only a
partial history since only written when people
were apart
- Provides a database that can be
searched for names, events, locations, etc.
- Preserves things like reactions to historical
events, language, and sayings of the times
- May lead to family history
information about other family members
mentioned
CONCLUSIONS
- Letter collections can be a major source of
family history information and provide
interesting glimpses into the lives of your
ancestors
- Are a major help in "turning your heart to
your fathers"
Return to the Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group Home Page or Don's Class Listings Page
.