Organizing and Sharing Letter Collection


As I make progress scanning in these old letters, I am trying to figure out how to best organize the letters for myself and others within the family


My first thought is to organize just sequentially. However I am now wondering if what I see as family newsletters should be separated from the private hand written letters. And what of those few that came from a different family member?

I have a bunch of files named by YYYYMMDDdesc. The pictures are on one drive and have Google docs with images and text transcriptions. I had hoped sorting these by name would put them in chronological order. Not sure why that failed. Second of all not all of the letters were dated - since a tilde seemed like a bad idea in a filename I used ish. I tried to guess based on content, or even what the letters before and after were. Sigh. A nice thing about the Google docs, is I have been sharing (comment) with the archive owner, who is appreciative of my effort.


Having both images and text seems redundant. For historical reasons, it is nice to see a copy of the original. Putting the images in a bound book has appeal (as a neat hardcopy backup).  After looking at  this set of 2022 photobook recommendations,  https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/best-photo-books, it seems that Costo Photo Service has an option that is inexpensive ($20 for 30 pages) has a  form factor that is good for letter sized (8.5x11) paper. Hopefully it's minimal functionality is enough. On the other hand I had always thought having book (or website) with a table of contents, and index was useful. (Clearly the archive owner looked at my list and wondered why it did not link. Hehe)  A textual format feeds into these. Google docs does not support embedded private documents . Apple pages has more functionality, but still not enough. I have not really looked at what Microsoft Office is offering for "free" from the cloud. It occurred to me, that because of GRAMPS, I had installed libreoffice. This is shareware that runs on multiple platforms. It seems to have the functionality I am looking for. (I am not sure why the writer’s guide, https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG73/WG73.html?fbclid=IwAR2RSsMeGi83FpRLKKsNXK1KNOtcx99sQiZukZwiIWreaW4utgqIuEpK8sc , is not more immediately accessible from the help pages, https://help.libreoffice.org/7.4/en-US/text/swriter/main0503.html?&DbPAR=WRITER&System=WIN ) Unlike the other word processing software I have considered, it keeps files local and does not share. However it is possible to export to pdf or xhtml and move the output to the cloud. Have not looked at Dropbox or Evernote recently. As my uncle says, to be developed.


Not Entering in Family Tree Software


Unfortunately there is still not a good way to transfer either media nor documents between assorted family tree software, so spending time entering it does not make sense. Despite that I still worry the problem for all the source transcriptions I have entered. I have not dug into the 2019 GEDCOM release,   5.5.1  .  Even if the revised standard does solve  the problem, I think I read something that said GRAMPS could not support it with it’s current infrastructure. 

Just updated Reunion 13 (quick and painless); Pulled up export and GEDCOM 5.5.1 is one of the options. According to wikipedia familysearch standard GEDCOM 7.0 is gaining traction. So this is a moving target. As an additional justification for not entering it into family tree software, there is a  focus is on proving information about folks. Letters are not considered proof. They are “just” story.


Not entering as familysearch memories as I don't want to give them copyright rights.

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