I have always had a fascination with family history, I am lucky enough to have a well documented timeline of my family on my mothers side.  In World War II my great grandfather Sydney Williams joined the 10th Mountain Division.  In 1939-40 was the first discussion of creating a military division meant for fighting in the mountains.  After training in the Colorado mountains in preparation they fought their way through the Italian alps during the war.  While Sydney was at war he sent letters home to his wife, his children later created a book with all these letters put together.  What I would like to do is create an interactive map that shows the route that he took through the alps during the war, while also digitalizing the letters.  With dates on all the letters, I would be able to show where the letters were written (generally) along the route.  

Bringing my Great Grandfathers letters to to a digital interface will allow more people to read and discover his story in a new and interactive way.  In addition, people will see and read a story about that war that is portrayed through letters to a soldiers wife, rather than the brutality of the war.  Letters being sent home could not give away any tactical moves that the division was planning, locations and more. It will interesting to see the change in tone of his letters sent in the days before a battle.  

Coupled with several more outside sources, such as “Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division,” by Peter Shelton. Shelton does extensive research and interviews to write that follows the unique division from its conception on a Vermont ski hill, through its dramatic World War II coming-of-age, to the ultimate revolution it inspired in American outdoor life.  In addition “Chronology of The 10th Mountain Division in World War II: January 1940 — 30 November 1945,” compiled by John Imbrie, has an in detail time line of where and what the 10th Mountain Division did during the war.  

On the technical side I would need to plot the routes on the map and create an interactive interface for the user to navigate.  To digitize any text from the book containing my great grandfathers letters, I found apps such as Finescanner that allow you to take photos of text and convert that into a document.  There is also a program that is used by Colby that transcribes scans of documents into a word doc that I can manipulate as well.  

The technical support I will need is troubleshooting any problems and brainstorming ideas for the programming side of the project.  In addition, I am planning on using a Google maps API to implement the map.  Initially I wanted to be able to change the boarders of countries to that which represented conquered German land at the time of the 10th Mountain Divisions invasion into Italy, as well as Italy’s boarders through the war.  This is only possible if I manually plot the boarders from another reference, however, I am not sure how clean this will look.  Unless there is another solution, I am very happy to leave the boarders as they are in the current day and age, portraying where the 10th Mountain Division trekked through modern day Italy. 

Up to this point, I have reached out to my Grandfather who said he will look for a copy of the book this week when he returns to his house in Massachusetts, and overnight me a copy by the end of the week.  I have started research on maps, dates, and sources that will help determine where key battles took place.  I have also started to gather the proper resources to set up the Google Map API through research of Googles documentation around their map API.  

This project would create a tool that members of my family could use to interact with what my great grandfather experienced during WWII.  With only a finite number of copies of “Dear Mary: Letters Home from the 10th Mountain Division (1944–1945)” it would be an interesting digitalization of his experience that would allow easy access to his story.