Remius said:
Currently going through all of my Grandfathers letters from the Second World War. Originals. Currently trying to preserve and protect them.
He was a POW after being shot down over Italy. Have the original telegrams listing him as MIA then as taken POW after they picked up a German broadcast. Even have the letter from the Minister of National Defence (RCAF, which is weird because I didn’t know they had one for each element) which looks like an invite card you’d get to a dinner, offering his sympathies. He was according to the local newspaper articles at the time one of the first if not the first Canadian POW repatriated back to Canada.
We were going to contact 424 squadron to see if any of this might have any value to their museum but my mother is adamant it stay with the family.
The letters are a treasure trove of info from a man who spent from 1941 to 1943 as a POW. The most heart wrenching one was him trying to tell his parents he lost his leg. And apologizing for being captured.
What you wrote lenaitch reinforces my belief that it should stay with us and not in a drawer.
As far as I can tell, 424 does not have a museum. It would either be the National Air Force Museum in Trenton given its current attachment, or the Bomber Command Museum in Nanton AB given its role in WWII. As far as I know, the BC museum is a private foundation and not part of the Canadian military museum network (OMMC). You could loan the items to a museum ('from the collection of . . .') under a formal loan agreement but there is no guarantee they would be on display or, if so, for how long. What we see on display at a museum is generally only part of their collection and they tend to rotate items on display.
The upside of giving/loaning them to a museum is they get shared to some degree and, depending on the museum, should appear in a database for research. The downside is you lose custody which can be scary. The upside of keeping them is they stay within the family; the downside is they aren't shared outside of the family and run the risk of getting lost in the mists of time without a family 'custodian'. Either way, I would definitely make scans of them in as high a resolution you can, just in case.
There are ways to better insure preservation, such as not folding, but also using acid-free folders and envelopes. The info might be available online or you could could PM me with an email address and I will forward it to her - I'm sure she would be happy to offer advice.
On the flipside, it's easy for the stories that go along with them to get lost in the family as well; my dad has a crate full of family photos, and doesn't know who half the people are in them (and neither do anyone else that is still alive). Not really sure what the best solution is to that, but even a simple note on the back, or putting them in a photoalbum with an annotation on a sticky note or something would be better then nothing.
Ya no kidding. I have a box full of photos with no clue who most of the people are, or know the people but not setting (i.e. WWII pics). Dad always spoke of uncle or aunt so-and-so but never explained how they fit in. Often they weren't, simply cousins nth removed, or even family friends who kids we told to call them aunt/uncle. We pestered dad to write things down and after he died we found some basic notes in his stuff - at least its something.