Finding That Old Stash of War Letters

Anyone who has been following the progress here at A Family Tapestry knows how old letters call my name. No, actually—warning to digital tailgaters!—I brake for old letters.

There is no describing the breathtaking moment when a family member handed me a stash of old World War II letters home. I was in awe. You may have followed along here as I began posting transcriptions of the notes from Frank Stevens as he made his way through boot camp, then specialized training, then across the Pacific to some serious action in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

So you can imagine how attentive I was when faithful scout and reader, Intense Guy (or, as we call him, Iggy for short) sent me a link to a Yahoo! News article about a stash of war letters.

If genealogy’s thrill of the hunt is still deep in your heart, you absolutely must take a look at this report. Better yet, go beyond the brief recounting at Yahoo! News to the source—the original publication in the Tulsa World—and read the saga of not only one uncovered stash of World War II letters, but of two.

This story within a story lays out the marching orders for anyone with a penchant for poking through old genealogical documents. I couldn’t resist, myself. The Tulsa World’s Michael Overall described how by a chance purchase at an estate sale fifteen years ago, a woman uncovered a stash of nearly two hundred fifty letters from 1940 onward—then, not knowing what to do with them, tucked them back onto a closet shelf.

Until now. For some reason, discovering a newspaper story about another found stash of letters was enough inspiration to try again to find the family of letter writers Eural and Robert Harvill of Creek County, Oklahoma.

Since we’ve tried our hands at this sort of thing so many times—think crowdsourcing the solution to finding descendants of orphan photographs' subjects at Forgotten Old Photos, for instance—you know it is no great challenge for us to locate online records that provide ample clues. While you’d think the name Eural is unusual enough to increase chances of an easy find, it does introduce some challenges for online searching, though, such as when the 1930 census taker for Creek County mistook that “Eural” for “Cural.” And since our Eural was evidently named after his own father, as son, he was called by his middle name, hence recorded as “Dale” in 1940.

Eural and Robert, the two letter-writing Harvill brothers, both have military records readily accessible online—Robert’s enlistment in 1940 indicating that he would be the one responsible for the earlier letters home, as Eural’s age precluded his enlistment until much later.

Knowing how much I yearn to discover such artifacts from my own family history, I so sincerely hope these wartime letters find their way home to a Harvill relative in short order.

Thankfully, there's now a heartwarming update, just in time for Memorial Day weekend festivities: the letters have made their way home to Eural Harvill's now-adult children.