Saturday, July 11, 2015

Day 13

Day 13
Rachel Brune cont.
Started by making the 3rd custom cover for the green notebooks. It has been a week since the last 2 so it didn't go quite as quick as before. Reminded me a lot of the pains of wrapping gifts - no matter how many times it seems I measure before I cut to make sure I have plenty of overlap, in the end, I come up just a little short. Sadly, this happened in the very last step, requiring me to do the second piece of the cover again. For such a small task, this took longer than I would have cared for.

 We got the CD back from being cleaned and I looked at several of the pictures contained on it. They seemed to be of three sets, two named after troop numbers 704th and 844th. The other was called "Bucca Trip". Armed with this information, I went back to the collection to see if I could find references to these in order to date the pictures.

The collection contains only a few personal letters she had written, so I checked those first in order to rule them out. In the pictures, we could see that she was using her camouflage covered notebook. Her personal notebooks are difficult to read as when writing for herself, her handwriting is difficult to follow. This is coupled with many of the notes are just snippets of sentences. And, there are only a few dates. However, near the middle of the book there was a page with the notation of "photos" and describes several of the photos that I saw with identification of the people involved. No specific date, but at least specific information we did not have before.

The next resource was all of her published articles which makes up a large part of the collection. I did not particularly relish this as it could easily take a long while. I started with the yearbook of the MP Times, an easy collection to scan through quickly. I found the Bucca reference first. It concerned the transition of an interrogation base from the British to the Americans and the work to make it into a base for the Military Police (MP) of which Brune was part. The troop designations followed almost immediately as they supplemented her own, the 800th. On top of that, I found further confirmation this was the time the photos referred to as several of the photos I saw on the disc were reproduced in the paper! I made copies of the relevant pages.

If making the last of the custom covers took longer than I wanted, the research thankfully took much less time that it easily could have. Especially if I had to continue to looking through the individual issues of publications and the many news clippings of her articles and photos that are part of the collection (the Journalism section is 5 folders, almost a whole box by itself).

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