by Pat Larrabee, Historian
A recent rediscovery of some wonderful letters is now available to the public to honor our veterans on Memorial Day.
The archives of The First Congregational Church of Greenwich contains 194 World War II era (1942 - mid 1944) letters that the church Historical Committee sorted and indexed in preparation for the church’s 350th anniversary in 2015.
These letters were from Greenwich service people to Mrs. Ethel Parry Fish, office Associate and former Youth Director at First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich.
I have scanned them for easy access and indexed them by the letter writer’s name, rank, location/APO and date, along with a short summary. I also scanned and retyped the 11 remaining monthly newsletters that Mrs. Fish mailed to about 500 service people from the whole town of Greenwich, no matter to what church they went. The newsletters and Index are searchable.
In addition, there is a wonderful New York Times article from April 27, 2003 about Rev. Sally Colegrove saving these letters from the dumpster when they were cleaning out the attics of the church. It has some interesting perspectives and excerpts.
These newsletters and letters are a real treasure trove of town, church and personal history of births, marriages and deaths as well as news from the service people. Some letters are amusing, sometimes with hand-drawn cartoons, and some poignant.
The service people wrote from all over the world, like India, New Guinea and “Somewhere in the Pacific”. Every one of them thanked Mrs. Fish for her wonderful long newsletters. It meant so much to them to not only hear the news but to know that everyone at home was thinking about and praying for them.
The church Youth Group collected Readers Digests and other books to mail to them, which the service people often passed around the barracks.
The paper letters will remain in the church archives, but the whole scanned collection is now available for the public. If anyone is a close relative of one of the letter writers and asks to have the original letter(s) from their relative, we will be glad to send it to them.
The Center for American War Letters Archives at Chapman University in California collects letters from service people from any war, so if you have a collection in your family archive or want to explore what Chapman University's collection contains, please contact them at the link. I am sending the War Letter Archives a link to the collection so they can add them to their expanding archive.
No comments:
Post a Comment