What to Do With Military Photos and Letters You Have Inherited
An unlabelled photograph has a shelf life of exactly one generation. After that it is a picture of a stranger, and no amount of care will bring the name back.
Most families have the box. Photographs, a folded flag, letters in a rubber band, a discharge paper, some patches. It gets moved from house to house and it is never quite dealt with, because dealing with it feels like it requires a whole weekend and a decision about what matters.
There is one thing in there that is genuinely time-critical, and it is not the paper. Paper in a dry box lasts a long time. What is running out is the number of people who can say who is in the photographs.
Do this first, before anything else
Step 1Sit with whoever still knows, and write on the back
Soft pencil, not pen, on the back of the print. Names, place, year, and anything he says about it. If the veteran himself is available, this single afternoon is worth more than every other step on this list combined. If he is not, find the oldest person who might recognize anybody and go to them.
Step 2Photograph or scan everything before you sort it
Do not organize first. Capture first, sort later. A phone camera in daylight is genuinely fine for this; the perfect scanner you intend to buy is one of the main reasons these boxes stay untouched for another decade. Capture the backs as well as the fronts.
Step 3Read the letters in date order and note what they contain
You are not transcribing yet. You are building an index: date, who to, and a one-line summary. This turns an unreadable bundle into something navigable, and it usually reveals a narrative nobody in the family knew was in there.
Step 4Get the service record
Next of kin can request official service records, and they supply dates, units, postings and decorations. This is the scaffolding that makes sense of everything else in the box, and it turns a pile of undated images into a sequence.
Step 5Store the originals properly and stop handling them
Out of the attic and out of the basement, because heat and damp are what actually destroy paper. Acid-free folders, a box, a shelf inside the house. Remove staples, paper clips and rubber bands, all of which cause real damage over time.
Step 6Put it into something people will read
A well-stored box is preserved and it is still not read. The photographs, the letters and the account belong together in a book that sits on a shelf where somebody can pick it up. Preservation and inheritance are different problems, and only the second one gets the story to the next generation.
How to read a photograph nobody can identify
Even with no living witness, a military photograph usually gives up more than people expect. It is worth an evening before you write anything off as unidentifiable.
- Insignia and patches. Unit, branch and often rank are readable with a magnifying glass, and unit insignia is extensively documented.
- The uniform itself. Uniforms changed in specific years, so the clothing frequently dates a photograph to within a couple of years on its own.
- The back. Photo labs stamped dates and locations, and many prints carry a censor's mark that names a theatre.
- The background. Vehicles, buildings, signage and vegetation all narrow a location. A single legible sign has resolved a great many family mysteries.
- The other faces. If one man is identified in one photograph, he is often the key to a dozen others taken the same week.
Storing the things that are not paper
A folded flag, a uniform, medals and equipment all need slightly different handling from photographs, and the common mistakes are easy to avoid.
Keep textiles out of plastic, which traps moisture and does more damage than open air. Refold a flag or a uniform along different lines every few years, because permanent creases eventually become tears. Do not polish medals; the surface is part of the object and cleaning reduces both its meaning and its value. And keep everything inside the living space rather than in an attic or a basement, because heat and damp destroy far more family archives than any accident does.
What to do with the memorabilia
Uniforms, patches, medals and equipment do not belong in a book, but photographs of them do. Lay each piece on a plain background in daylight, photograph it, and write down what it is and what it meant. That way the object can be given to whoever wants it without the knowledge attached to it being lost.