TEXAS \u2014 In July, thousands of letters and donations were mailed to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, eventually birthing the Condolence Letter Project.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s deeply emotional,\u201d said Schreiner University\u2019s library manager, Sarah Sides. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve been able to process all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
As millions of dollars in donations poured into Kerr County after the Fourth of July flooding, so did these letters.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the letters children wrote, and then they included these little trinkets to give out,\u201d said Sides.<\/p>\n
Sides was asked if the library would be interested in housing the growing number of heartfelt notes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was going kind of through my own trauma from the flood,\u201d said Sides. \u201cAnd I was like, great, a project.\u201d<\/p>\n
As special collections coordinator, Sides agreed to take the notes, and the Condolence Letter Project was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were told it was about a thousand letters,\u201d Sides said. \u201cThin pieces of paper stacked together is a lot. And it was just an outpouring of condolences from all over the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As it turns out, there were over 2,000 letters, some reaching Texas from the U.K. and Canada. Library interns are going through each letter one by one.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople handwriting letters, that\u2019s kind of a rare thing nowadays,\u201d said library intern Mia Ravera.<\/p>\n
Letters came in from about 800 cities across the country. Library intern Kacey\u00a0Zaiontz said the project team has a map with pins representing all those places.<\/p>\n
From kids’ drawings to small notes, these handwritten letters will be preserved for years to come.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust beautiful to see people from all different kinds of backgrounds feeling that this was so important that they had to write a letter,\u201d Sides said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t send an email.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part one of the project, archiving the physical letters, is complete. Part two is to digitize. In the future, researchers will be able to access everything, thanks to a $15,000 grant.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of our Hill Country Collection,\u201d Sides said. \u201cFor research purposes, we do want to have the physical and the digital. Because if anything were to happen, we\u2019d still have at least the digital files.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took well over 100 hours to build this archive from scratch, recording history as it unfolds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never knew how many people would care about little ol\u2019 Kerrville,\u201d Zaiontz said. \u201cAnd sending their condolences. And their wishes and their prayers for us. It\u2019s just so meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sides said this Condolence Letter Project is special. It\u2019s helping the team push through during a dark time in the Hill Country.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite a horrific tragedy, the world does come together,\u201d Sides said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEXAS \u2014 In July, thousands of letters and donations were mailed to the Community Foundation of the Texas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[21023,14209,65180,132,1570,102,138,14210,223,82,84,83,27,26986,1659,1569,835],"class_list":["post-326260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-amber-hughes","tag-app-human-interest","tag-app-latest-human-interest-stories","tag-austin","tag-ctv","tag-dallas","tag-el-paso","tag-human-interest","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-texas","tag-texas-editors-picks","tag-texas-floods","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}