The Collection
Among the many artifacts of interest I received from my great-uncle Everette Van Wert (and subsequently scanned) were the letters and postcards I have included in this post. Each one is a letter from Forrest Everette Van Wert (my 2nd great grandfather) to his wife Carrie Blanche Smith (my 2nd great grandmother). Forrest was a risk taker. While this may have contributed to his success in business it also contributed to his early death aged 38 on the 21st of October, 1918- the result of his car rolling down an embankment. It is rather incredible that he survived as long as he did- he was a man who had brushed paths with death numerous times before. He had previously survived his car getting hit by a train and before that survived an accidental shooting. One of the postcards in my collection also suggests he may have narrowly escaped death by carbon monoxide poisoning after parking his car in a shed for the night. Given Forrest's propensity for beating the odds it seems fitting that after over 100 years his writings home have survived for me to scan and preserve.
In my preservation of these letters I attempted to provide faithful transcriptions. In old letters it isn't uncommon for the 'voice' of the writer to leak through the text in the form of grammatical and spelling decisions. A lot can be derived from how an ancestor writes; I particularly enjoy spelling errors that reflect the person's accent or manner of speaking. I have attempted to keep as many of these misspellings and grammatical deviations in my transcriptions as possible. It is entirely possible however, even likely, that I have made mistakes in some of my transcriptions. If you see one, I invite you to notify me in the comments below and I will correct the error.
Undated Postcard
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| Postcard Front |
