Introduction
In the fall of 2014, a box of letters was discovered in the closet of a condominium in Monroe Township, New Jersey. Unnoticed and forgotten for over seventy years the letters reveal the story of a young US Navy sailor during the final two years of WWII and its aftermath. Two hundred and eighty eight letters and cards were discovered , two hundred and sixty one of which were written by S1c Andrew Tschinkel (1920-2006) to his mother Sophie Tschinkel (1881-1961). The letters over the course of more than nine hundred handwritten pages give the reader a first person account of the ordinary concerns of a young man and his widowed mother against the backdrop of world events that unleashed forces that continue to reverberate into the third decade of the following century.
The letters are impressive for many reasons not the least of which is their legibility derived from the excellent penmanship of their author. The clarity of the penmanship made the arduous task of transcription relatively straightforward. Remarkably too, the letters served as a sort of Rosetta Stone providing the context, and rationale for almost one hundred photographs housed in the Tschinkel family photograph album as well as descriptions of the persons, places and events depicted in the photographs. Last but not least the letters inspired research into episodes ranging from the sinking of an Allied troop ship by a Nazi U-Boat on Christmas Eve of 1944 in the frozen waters of the English Channel with the loss of 763 American soldiers, a disaster that was not disclosed to the public until fifty years later, to accounts of the nightclubs, hotels, restaurants and shows of Hollywood, California enjoyed by American soldiers and sailors while on liberty in 1945 including a first hand account of being among a crowd of servicemen who were entertained by a future President of the United States then actor Ronald Reagan.
Annotation Policy
Because S1c Tschinkel’s letters are so allusive to people, literary works, motion pictures, places and events of the day, informative annotations are particularly important to this digital project, and many letters are fully annotated. We focus our annotation research on subjects not broadly known by most readers, such as S1c Tschinkel’s family relatives, friends, co-workers and neighbors. An annotation is available for frequently mentioned names in the letters, and it includes brief biographical details for that person including years of birth and death and a succinct description of S1c Tschinkel’s relationship with them. In many cases, we also include a photograph of the person in the annotation.
Three categories of annotations - people, places, and motion pictures - are most thoroughly researched. For every letter that requires more specific explanation about one of these categories--for example, when knowledge of a specific episode in a person’s life illuminates a letter, or when S1c Tschinkel’s relationship to a particular person, place or film needs to be made clear--we write individualized annotations attached to specific documents.
Database
The Tschinkel Navy Letters are organized into a database. The scanned images of letters and photos and the data associated with each type of digital object are contained in a database management system or DBMS. Grubba Pro is the DBMS utilized to access and retrieve the images of letters and photographs and data from the letters, photographs, audio recordings and other data types in the database. Many people are familiar with Excel spreadsheets as a way to store and retrieve data but data in spreadsheets is generally difficult to share among multiple users. Databases on the other hand use dedicated servers which enable multiple users to remotely access and retrieve data. Large digital file types including mp4, jpg and pdf images of the letters and photographs are stored in cloud storage accounts with either box.com or dropbox.com and hyperlinks in the database allow easy retrieval and display of these images by database users.
The server for the Tschinkel Navy Letters is hosted by Dreamhost.com
A detailed explanation of the data fields in the Tschinkel Navy Letters database is available here