I found this on the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Museum website: http://www.state.sc.us/crr/ It seems like something worthwhile to share. If any of you are active in local or state historical or genealogical societies, a similar program might be worth considering. Nancy, researching: Carmichael; Garrett; Dawkins; Osborne; Baldridge; Warren; Doty; McCormick; Garmon; Jackson; Matthews; Cain; Stringer Website: http://www.geocities.com/twincousin2334 List Administrator: USCW-SEVEN_PINES List Administrator: CARMICHAEL Mar. 10, 2003 Preserving Heartfelt E-Mails from the Front Confederate Relic Room and Museum Spearheads Plan to Save Pieces of War History By JOEY HOLLEMAN Imagine Ken Burns' documentary "The Civil War" without the letters from the front. Or Andrew Carroll's book "War Letters" if sweethearts didn't save missives from soldiers inside Nazi Germany. Historians fret that those uncensored, heartfelt word snapshots could be lost in a communications environment dominated by e-mail and instant messaging. To head that off, the Confederate Relic Room and Museum, depository of war history in South Carolina, is asking people to forward their e-mails from overseas to the state agency so the words can be archived for future historians. The program is called "Write From The Front" (The e-mail address is WriteFromtheFront@sc.gov ) The program isn't designed to save these words for your personal use. "We want that history," said Allen Roberson, director of the Relic Room. The e-mails will be archived for future researchers. Of course, your grandson or granddaughter could be that future researcher. Anybody is welcome to use the archives. Through the Washington, D.C.-based Legacy Project, "War Letters" author Carroll encourages people to save whatever communication they get from service members overseas. "They're so modest," he said. "They can't imagine that anyone would be interested in what they're doing. "I tell them, 'What you write is the most important thing to come out of this.''" The Legacy Project has set up an e-mail address similar to the one by the Confederate Relic Room. You can forward e-mails to warletterproject@aol.com The difference from the Relic Room site is that only Carroll will read the items submitted to the Legacy Project. If he finds them especially compelling, he will contact the sender to ask whether the e-mail can be included in future editions of his book. CHANGING TECHNOLOGY The folks who keep track of our history see e-mail as a two-edged sword. Because e-mailing is easier than taking a pen to paper, more communication might be coming home from the possible confrontation in the Persian Gulf. People with children away at college have noticed that trend in recent years. But how many parents thought to save those e-mails from their college children for their grandchildren to read? Roy Tryon thinks the answer is "not many." He should know. He's the father of a college-age child and deputy director of the S.C. Archives and History Department. "E-mail is something we've talked about for many years," Tryon said of archivists. "And it's even worse when you talk about instant messaging. That's just lost in the ether." Remembering to save e-mail from soldiers is only a first step. Then you have to decide how to store it. You could keep it on a diskette or a CD-ROM, but those formats might not last forever. Say you stored some correspondence on a big floppy disk 10 years ago and tossed it in a shoe box in the closet. Now it's hard to find a computer that will read those old floppy disks. "Unless people become really conscious of preserving them, (the e-mails) won't survive," Tryon said. "It takes more forethought than paper and pen did. With those old letters, you could just push it off to the side, throw it in a box, and later it surfaced in an attic." Experts say the best way to ensure the words will last might be the old-fashioned technology -- ink on paper. Hit the print button. Then treat the e-mail printout like a letter. File it away. STORAGE TIPS Some service families are trying to preserve their correspondence. Debbie used to print out her frequent e-mails from her husband, Andy, on his overseas assignments out of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter. "I'm sentimental," she said. "I save everything." (The armed forces have asked that last names of family members not be used in newspaper stories for safety reasons.) Debbie said the expense of paper and ink forced her to stop printing the e-mails. Now, she transfers each e-mail to a folder on her computer hard drive. Some were saved on a computer now used by her daughter. Amanda, whose Shaw-based husband, Scott, also is overseas, said she saves his e-mails on disks. "It's a scary time," she said. "If something happens, I want to have something." But experts warn that computers can crash, information can be lost. They suggest storing e-mails on your computer hard drive, downloading them onto backup disks every week or two. And, eventually, you should print out the most poignant ones. Carroll, who included e-mail correspondences in the most recent edition of his book, said e-mails are better for historians than are other electronic media, such as satellite phone technology. At least e-mails can be saved. Phone calls, like instant messaging, disappear. "I've talked with servicemen and women (from recent action in Afghanistan) who said, 'I called home. I never really wrote,'" Carroll said. Historians aren't worried about the survival of military details from future wars. The government uses expensive record-keeping software that will archive military e-mails for future generations. The Relic Room wants to do that on a smaller scale and a more personal level. They ask for S.C. residents to forward e-mail from overseas with brief explanations of where it's from and who wrote it. They want personal observations, not military details. Roberson noted letters from the Civil War through the Gulf War have dealt with similar topics -- what's going on at home, wish I was there, things stink here. The good thing about "Write From The Front" is that if the e-mails get too intimate, you just don't forward them. In that case, however, you might want to hit the print button.