You've Got Mail!

Alas, this shall be my final blog post. My year as an intern at the Gaston County Museum is over, and it’s time to pass the torch to another emerging museum professional. Internships are invaluable in gaining experience for jobs. This internship has been with a superb group of people, and I would recommend it to anyone.

My final project as an intern has been cataloging a collection of letters from the 1950s from a large family that lived in Gaston County. Letters are exciting to museum professionals and historians because they are honest writings about day to day activities. They can have beautiful quotes and provide opinions about the events of the times. This collection is mainly letters to one brother from his brothers and sisters in the area.

The letters also remind us that human life is often mundane. The content is often writing of the weather (it used to snow here a LOT – feet and feet of snow in Mount Holly), updates on the health and deaths of various family and friends (nearly one death per letter), making plans for visiting (how could you plan a trip by letter? If someone writes that they will be at the train station in two days you had better be sure you show up), and sharing various other information. Every once in a while the different writers will reference larger world events such as communism or various political persons like Kennedy.

What is interesting to ponder is who will read the communications we send? All of our written communication is in electronic devices. Many emails are kept on the internet but only available as long as there is access to the email account. They won’t get passed along from generation to generation. No one else will be able to read them except for those who print their emails. This digital age is going to be difficult to archive because our text messages die with our phone batteries. Our ability to communicate has tripled with email and text but the likelihood of preserving it has dropped tremendously. I recommend taking the time to send a hand written note or letter to your friends that you usually message. Maybe that letter will become precious and stay with that person for a life time, and a museum can read it one day and truly know what life was like in the 2000s.