In this clip from our webinar, A Legacy of Love: Digitized Letters Bridge Generations, guest Rosemary Cassie explains the emotional core this collection of letters holds for her family, especially after her mother passed away in early 2020.
Making sure the letters were available to the family and using them to maintain connection were two of Cassie’s biggest goals in pursuing digitization.
If video isn’t for you, the transcript for this portion of the talk is below.
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Transcript
Rosemary Cassie: When my mother passed away, well, she was diagnosed with brain cancer in March of 2020, and so she had to move into her house because that was just during the lockdown. One of the things as she got sicker was she wanted these letters. I didn’t realize this but they had she had over 300 letters, 1,200 pages of written out pieces of paper and she had stored them in bundles with ribbon in a plastic linen bag. They were in one of her drawers. So I rushed over to get these letters and brought them to my house.
Then as she got more ill, the one thing that gave her solace was hearing the words come to life, and so people, as they came to visit would just take the letters and read them to her. I think the most remarkable thing is that the my father was so prolific and writing and he had beautiful penmanship.
Simon Fine: Amazing. So, how did you find Anderson Archival?
Rosemary Cassie: Well, right after she passed in April of 2020—because you don’t get a lot of controls when somebody passes nor could we plan a funeral—everybody was asking what do we do with these letters, because now they’re very familiar with them, and there’s bits and pieces of stories that came to life . My daughter-in-law literally Googled, “family archive letter,” you know, “family archive,” and she found you.
I emailed you, and I think it was a great experience, because Mark emailed me back immediately. We talked about what it was I was wanting to do, but the number one thing I wanted to do is make sure everybody in the family could have a piece of our parents story.
I knew that just doing it, scanning it on my own, 1) I didn’t have enough time in the year to do that, 2) it wouldn’t have the quality that I think that these letters deserved. They were very old. You can see kind of on some of the images that they were on sometimes very light air, you know, airmail paper back in the day.
