Undated letters and cards is our Saturday blog post today. And a reminder that today kicks off the 21 day challenge of Writing Letters of Kindness to the Elderly.
In getting ready for an upcoming scrapbooking crop I’m rounding up memorabilia (including some letters and cards) that had gotten stuck into a oversized Rubbermaid tub of mine – you probably have one too ! Maybe more than one?
Today has been the day to tackle said tub and I’m so glad I did – it resulted in coming across some undated letters and cards. There were some that still had their envelope with it and included legible date stamp but others didn’t.
What was interesting was how many letters and cards had no date – and especially if the envelope with it was no longer around – it makes it a challenge figuring out exactly when it was received or even to be close on figuring out which year! The stack even included some Christmas cards in there too – imagine Christmas newsletters with no year indicated anywhere on it!
Undated letters and cards
Finding this large stack of undated letters and cards brought to mind how moving forward I want to best store this set and take better care of them. It was interesting to see several collections listed for correspondence when doing a search that they included a category of ‘undated’ – it has me wanting to minimize my own undated letters and cards of my personal correspondence.
For example, at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum Collection “A Finding Aid to the Letters, Empty Envelopes, and Greeting Cards Collection, 1753-1999, undated” – if you read further down that page you will come across entries, with “undated” following the description and the last entry from Box 3, Folder 40 it describes: “Greeting Cards: Christmas Cards, undated”.
My plans for some of these undated letters and cards have me envisioning manually cutting and pasting part of the envelope that contains the date and pasting to the back of the letter, or card so there is a date (even if only the year) associated with it. It is important to me that I get these dates squared away before they get bundled together with grosgrain ribbons tied around them and stored into my AnchoredScraps correspondence hat box.
You may wonder why go to the trouble – what comes to mind immediately is the example that one of my college girl friends we are still writing each other and considering how many years we have written it is nice to be able to look back at her letters from over the years and to not have to guess when it was written!
Most of us have at least one of those boxes/tubs/paper sacks sitting in a closet , or tucked under a desk waiting for you to properly go through it. My dear friend Tally had reminded me of the old reliable setting-the-timer-for-an-hour-to see-how-much-progress-could-be-made to help stay focused and it really does help! Why not see if you can find an hour this weekend and try it – your memorabilia will thank you! And you saw it coming – we really do want to include a date on our cards and letters we send.
And here is a reminder that today kicks off the 21 day challenge of Writing Letters of Kindness to the Elderly and I hope you will consider trying it too.
Anchors Aweigh,
Helen
Attribution & Thank you to the following who are referenced today —
Link to Martha’s Vineyard Museum Collection “A Finding Aid to the Letters, Empty Envelopes, and Greeting Cards Collection, 1753-1999, undated”
Image above of the The Anchored Scraps Correspondence Hat box April 30, 2015 photo and written by Helen Rittersporn, especially by Scrap and Design
Image above from AnchoredScraps.com blog post Writing Letters of Kindness to the Elderly December 29, 2015 written by Helen Rittersporn
