This step is not really necessary but because of some other thoughts we decided to make a typed version of each letter. And after more thinking and looking at the letters as we were scanning them in, we now feel that this step was a good decision. This will make it a lot easier for people to read, as we found out trying to convert them. You will greatly appreciate this step. Because of some deterioration, but mainly because of his hand writing it allowed us to figure out what he actually is saying. It also allows us not to correct but to correctly identify cities or peoples names.

Overall, reading the letters are not hard but because of the way they talked back then did hinder us somewhat. Some of his abbreviations also confused us, like enuf. As I said, we are not correcting him so if the sentence sounds strange, it's because of how he wrote it.

The only thing we did correct were some city names or people's names. If he misspelled them then we corrected it, if it was real. Some cities and names though we are unsure of. All we did for these was to spell them the way they looked in the letter. You do have to remember, this was war when he wrote these and because of censorship or trying to deceive the enemy, some were made up. Another possibility, the cities may no longer exist. We are not doing that in depth research.