SentLetters

I originally set up this site, because I wanted a site where I could share my letters and notes from my friends and family. I believe that the entire gambit of emotion and humanity can be shown through what we write down on paper. What I realized upon doing some research into my own letters, realizing that most of them were just notes among friends, I decided to go out and see if I could find some more interesting letters.

I went to Ebay, thinking no way there are people out there who are selling their letters, these things are sentimental, have genealogical purpose and meaning. Well, they were selling them, a lot of them. So I bought some, and started posting them.

Then I started to wonder who these people were, what were they talking about, what was happening around them? I started the wiki to place my research on these topics in a place where I could easily find it. There is not a ton of information in the wiki, but the things I have found, I place there under the names of the people the information is about.

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Think about the letters that you have received in the past. Think about the things that you write about everyday in emails, and then think about all the things that people used to talk about in letters, that are so easily generalized in emails today. We use quick phrases that are supposed to have so much meaning, but that by simple overuse of them have almost no meaning now.
Our society has changed so fast, and there are so many things that “need” to get done. We sometimes forget about the people around us, let alone the people that are not around us. It is so easy to send an email, and as a result they don’t always carry the feelings and implications that a letter carries with it. It is hard to remember those people that are 50, 100, 200 miles away, and it takes so little time to write a letter and put it in your mail box, but no one does this anymore.
Letters are almost a dead medium for sending information. It is a sad state of affairs, because letters can last hundreds of years, whereas emails, and digital messages only last as long as it takes the hard drive to die, your computer to crash and burn, or the user to delete the message.

I always found it amazing the impact that a letter has when an unexpecting friend or relative send me a letter. It is so nice to go to the mailbox and find something other than junk mail filling the entire box. It has a whole separate emotional effect than “You’ve got Mail” does when it pops up on the screen.

What I realized was that letters are not always the messages that we send through the mail. Letters can be written on anything really. They don’t have to be sent, they can be hand delivered. When I was moving from apartment to apartment, I found a box of old notes from friends in High School, and realized that they were letters.

I also found a bunch of letters from friends in HighSchool in a manilla envelope. I had a teacher that would ask us to write letters to whomever we want, and then he would take them until our senior year and send them to our address. By the time it came to get the letters, most people had forgotten about them. It was a time-capsule of sorts, showing you how things were, and what you had to say during the time when you sent the letter originally.

All of these things have influenced me to create this site, and upload my letters. I hope that by looking at my letters you think about the things that you used to think, and say, and do. I hope that it gives you a window into where I come from, but moreso as you read the letters on this site you will start to learn more about yourself.

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