Tom Cartmell’s daughter sent me a large package of letters and scrapbooks about Tom that her mother, Zoe, had kept after his death.

Among the items were all (I think) the letters Tom sent to his dad, Dr. Cartmell, and his stepmother, Cleda. They had been carefully arranged by date, starting at February 24, 1943, and continuing until April 26, 1945, when he was killed. Saved were the letters, the envelopes, and sometimes enclosures.

In addition, the first 27 letters included a typed transcription of the letter. The character of the typing was more amateur than professional. There were some inked changes and annotations that I recognize as being my grandfather’s (Dr. Cartmell’s)  handwriting.

The transcriptions were not always accurate. Misspellings were usually corrected, missing words were added, and individuals mentioned by name were identified by their relationship to Tom. (such as “Zoe” was transcribed as “my girlfriend”) Sometimes, Dr. Cartmell misread (and mis-transcribed) individual words.

In some cases, individual sentences had a line drawn through them, and that sentence was omitted from Dr. Cartmell’s transcription. In another case, an entire paragraph was lined-out and did not appear in the transcription. Once, Dr. Cartmell had cut out a sentence from the original letter, to permanently remove that sentence.

In making my own transcriptions for “A Young Man Went Off to War,” I followed the original letters, not Dr. Cartmell’s transcriptions, although I found his transcriptions interesting. Interesting, but not completely reliable.

I had some questions about Dr. Cartmell’s 27 transcriptions. When did he make them? Why did he make them? Why did he stop after the first 27 letters? Why did he leave out some sentences or whole paragraphs? Dr. Cartmell died in 1953, his second wife in 1987, and all of his children and their spouses are gone. There is no one left to ask about this. So my guess is as good as anyone’s and probably better than most.

My theory is that he transcribed these letters as a way of working through his grief at having lost his only son, whom he loved very much. I do not believe he transcribed them as the letters first came to him, but only worked on them after Tom died. In this theory, I believe he stopped transcribing after the first 27 because his work on this was either no longer needed or no longer effective in managing his grief. Perhaps he had come to terms with his loss and the act of continuing the transcriptions was starting to make things worse.