Having completed (more or less) my project of reviewing, organizing, and deleting redundant scan files (originally numbering around 3,400, currently less than 100), and having completed transcribing my great-grand uncle’s diary of his 1921 trip to St. Lucia (in preparation for my trip there in the next few months), I have now only one remaining active special project: transcribing my late father-in-law’s World War 2 letters.

I have made progress on this; yet I’m not close enough to the end to know when that will come. At the end of my transcribing on Saturday, I had finished exactly 100 letters. Each has been pulled from the green plastic bin it sat in for at least 30 years, been dusted off, unfolded, deciphered, and the words and other key information added to an electronic file created especially for it, one file for each letter. Then it was put back in the bin in correct chronological order based on date of writing, not on the postmark. At the same time, I entered the letter into an index file formatted for eventual inclusion in a book of these letters.

They trace the life of Wayne Cheney from his graduation from high school in 1942 through his leaving home for work/school, his enlistment as an 18-year-old, until his discharge from the army air corps in late 1945. So far, most of the letters are those written by Wayne to his family (dad, mother, two sisters) back in little Fowler, Kansas. Many of the envelopes include a “censor’s stamp” when he was located at a forward base overseas. A few have words excised with a razor blade as the censor removed something he thought inappropriate. A few of the letters are from his mother, a few from his older brother who was also in the army, and a few from his sisters.

That’s based on the 100 letters transcribed so far. I haven’t counted the ones not yet transcribed. Such counting seemed like a waste of time. But based on the thickness of the letters not yet done compared to those done, I estimate I have 120 to 150 more to go. I find I can only do so much of this work in a given day before I hit a wall of fatigue and have to shift to something else. Three letters a day is about my limit. At that rate, it will take me the rest of the year to complete the transcribing, accounting for trips and holidays.

Once that’s done, my plan is to take Wayne’s war diary/journal and integrate it with the letters. Before his death, Wayne typed his WW2 journal, adding a post-war supplement to it, and printed it in multiple copies. I gave one copy to his son, kept one, and trashed a number of duplicates. The electronic version is somewhere on a diskette in an old Word Perfect file. I think I will scan the printed file to text and work with that.

I don’t have a lot of photos from Wayne’s service year, but what few I have I’ll add in.

I have no idea how long this book will be. If the letters average 500 words and there are, say, 240 of them, that’s a 120,000 word book not including the diary/journal. That would be a sizable undertaking, and is possibly biting off quite a bit more than I can chew.

But there’s nothing to do but continue, and make this unfiltered history a little more accessible for the few who will be interested. If I’m able to complete the project, I’ll give a copy of the book to the Meade County Historical Museum, the Fowler Library, and give a copy to each near relative, I suppose. I’ll make it available on Amazon should there be a cousin or two interested.