"Experiencing WWI through artifacts" Topic

…One particularly large donation that has been waiting to enter our collection for a while are the personal belongings of Thomas Franklin Ward, who fought in WWI. The donation comprised a jumbled assortment of letters, professional documents, knick-knacks and larger artifacts (including a pair of crutches). I had no background knowledge about who Thomas Ward was, or why his things had been donated, so I began the process of examining and sorting…

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That was interesting. As an archivist I was wholly concerned with official state records not personal collections, but I worked in the same area as the personal collections archivists. We did a lot of back and forth about how to handle various collections.

Jim

> I still have my father's M1 carbine from Peleliu, and a pretty unusual 6.5mm Arisaka "Type I" rifle that he liberated from Yokosuka arsenal shortly after the Japanese surrender.
> An uncle passed on to me a German WW2 Luftwaffe M35 trophy helmet which I later discovered to have had the original owner's name scratched into the paint on the inside of the back neck flare. Spooky.
> Way back when at an otherwise nondescript estate sale, I bought a beautiful pair of German WW1 Goerz binoculars + case, captured by the seller's father in the AEF's 1918 St Mihiel offensive.

Reading about war is one thing; touching it is another thing altogether.

B