Methodology

A brief insight into the structure of our letter collection makes it easier to navigate to specific letters and people. A family circle is created from each collection of letters, in which all family members who were involved in the letters are gathered. If the sender and recipient of a letter are specified, they can be linked. In this way, the individual letters in the family collection are linked to the individual family members and a small network is created, which makes searching easier.

Not all letters have had their sender(s) and recipient(s) identified. If this is the case, there is no link and if there is a suspicion, the uncertain data is marked by a flag in the title and metadata, namely a question mark within brackets ("[?]"). If the question mark is at the end of the full name, the person from the family circle is probably the sender or recipient. If a name is bracketed with a question mark, or only a question mark is given, there is uncertainty about the first name of the sender or recipient and it is also considered an assumption.