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My day at work
12 years ago
Spent the day working in the city archives here, sorting old newspaper editions from the 20s to the 60s during the morning and then spending all afternoon scanning handwritten letters written by guys in the trenches during WW1. As these letters are almost 100 years old, many of them were rather brittle and faded. I was almost afraid to handle some of them in case they just crumbled away in my fingers. Lots of 'Thanks for the cigarettes' ( I guess everyone smoked back then ) and 'I can't wait until this war is over so I can go home and... **insert dream**'.
Gut instinct tells me half of these guys never came home.
Anyway, given that I spent all day handling decades old paper I'm now getting quite itchy in spots. I think I picked up some fleas direct from WW1.
Gut instinct tells me half of these guys never came home.
Anyway, given that I spent all day handling decades old paper I'm now getting quite itchy in spots. I think I picked up some fleas direct from WW1.
We get some snow around Jan or Feb ( there was a little on Saturday ) but it's only once every two or three years that it'll get really heavy and stick. This was the last 'major' fall we had, back in 2010:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finbar.....ek/5292931607/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/finbar.....in/photostream
The interior of the country gets it more regularly, but I'm on the coast.
One of the ones I read was about how they'd suffered a gas attack from the Germans but had avoided the worst by putting on their 'gas helmets' and lighting bonfires to turn the gas into 'thinner vapor' (?).
Another one had the word 'rifle' written several times on the reverse. Must have been a long night.
Because that happened to me with a photocopier once ( when I had to run off 100 copies ).
My job today was simply to scan each one ( and the envelopes, too, if they still existed ) and save them as TIFF files. I think the main issue was simply preservation as the originals are pretty delicate now, however I'm sure it'd be a simple job to present these scans online. I know that old documents have been made available online before, such as scans of the 1901 and 1911 census forms, so maybe something will be done with these letters for next year.
There were hundreds of them and I only managed to scan about 50 or 60 ( many were made up of several pages ). I noticed a few of them had been written on squared paper, like pages from a maths copybook.