Our Boy

Carl Henry Maar (1897-1971)

Letter from Charles Maar to Earl Reed Silvers

May 23, 1918

Through text encoding with TEI-XML, I was able to markup a historical correspondence and provide additional relevant information for a reader or researcher on the people, places, and events mentioned in the correspondence.

The letter I transcribed was fairly short. The letter was sent from Charles Maar to Earl Reed Silvers on May 23, 1918. Charles Maar informs Silvers that he is sending over some letters written by “our boy” to be used in Silvers’ Quarterly.

Through researching the individuals involved, I learned that Charles Maar is the father of Rutgers Alumnus Carl H Maar, and the phrase “our boy” in the letter must be referring to Carl. Attached is a clip of a website where I found much information on Carl Maar and his family, and his relation to Charles.

Below I show how I learned to incorporate the knowledge that “our boy” is referring to Carl Maar while transcribing my letter in markup, using a referral string. I would not have been able to include this information without intruding on the letter using another method of transcription.

This piece was particularly enlightening as it helps clarify how Silvers was able to obtain such a vast collection of records on his Alumni during WWI: He asked their family and friends for help! This lab helped show me that during WWI, most letters were viewed as public information, in contrast to the privacy policies on mail correspondences today. Through families’ willingness to part with their letters, Silvers was able to obtain archival collection documenting Rutgers Alumni during WWI.

One error that I did encounter during this project was a schema error (see pictures below). I am not quite sure what this means, and I tried to work with the professor to sort this out but we were not able to identify the solution. We think the problem is stemming from my use of a PC over a Mac, or from the version of VS I have downloaded.