Love Through the Wartime Mail
There was nothing unusual about a serviceman sending photographs and messages home during World War II. That is precisely what makes this little collection part of a much larger history.
War separated millions of husbands and wives, sweethearts, parents, children and friends.
Mail became a lifeline.
Letters carried news. Photographs carried faces and places. Postcards marked someone’s travels. Small souvenirs gave the person at home something tangible to hold.
And people waited for the mail.
We tend to remember World War II through its enormous events — Pearl Harbor, troop movements, battles, casualties and victory.
But those events were made up of millions of individual lives.
People fell in love.
They waited.
They worried.
They planned marriages.
They imagined the lives they would have when the war was over.
And sometimes a young serviceman in Seattle bought a tiny cloth mailbag, filled it with photographs, and sent it across the country to the woman he loved.
Read More From Nancy
A Wartime Marriage
This is the marriage certificate of my parents, Roger Edward Watson and Mary Elizabeth Hannigan. They were married on May 3, 1944, at Saint John the Evangelist Church in Concord, New Hampshire, while my father was home on leave during World War II. My father came from West Virginia, while my mother had grown up […]
Exploring the Future
Among my father’s papers is this collection of letters from Fireside Industries, a Michigan company that sold arts and crafts through home representatives. The correspondence was addressed to him in Martinsburg, West Virginia, when he was still a teenager, long before he would marry my mother or begin raising a family. At first glance, these […]
An Unsettled Year – 1941-1942
There is a year of my father’s life that I am slowly piecing together: 1941. He is twenty years old, and his life looks unsettled and scattered across a map. Through my grandmother’s letters, I can trace him from Concord, NH in December of 1940, to Martinsburg, WV in the summer of 1941 and then to […]
