Sylvia's Journal

It is a curious phenomenon that I feel drawn to digitize things: journals, letters, photos, slides. Maybe it has something to do with my age. I want to make it easy for our kids to learn about their parents’ and grandparents’ lives before they were born or when they were still very young. And (or) maybe it is because I don’t want that history to be lost to a dumpster.

Some time ago I started transcribing and translating my diaries that chronicle so many transitions, starting in 1976:

• From husband number 1 to husband number 2 with the accompanying roller coaster rides
• From one continent to another
• From dinks (dual income no kids) to parenthood
• From dinks to single income with kids and living in NYC
• From the intense learning on the job, both the technical aspects and navigating organizational dynamics myself and learning about them
• From having aging parents to losing them over a period of 14 years
• From being healthy, limber and adventuresome to being pulled out of a plane wreck
• From working full time to working less, and less, and less.

I am far from done with this project, but I started a new one, which is a lot less daunting. For this new project I hired experts who, in exchange for a carload of money, turned my twenty five or so double 8 and super 8 reels of film into an external hard drive with all of those home movies in digital form.

While that project was handled by others, I started to transcribe and translate the letters my dad wrote when he was Tessa’s age and traveled across French speaking Africa, followed by his handwritten letters to my mom. The latter I typed in Dutch and then asked ChatGPT to translate them into English. It was done in a matter of seconds in a way I couldn’t have done as well myself. Even though I consider myself bilingual in Dutch and English, it was humbling to discover how often I had to use AI to find the right English phrases for my father’s interesting and at times funny Dutch phrases. It gave me a new appreciation for people who translated texts before we had computers and easy access to Google-Translate, and especially for those who translate(d) poetry. This project is done now. 

On to the next. There are two projects that have moved to the front burners of the stove. The first is transcribing my mother’s ‘Year by Year book,’ which, according to the publisher (John Walker & Co. LTD), is ‘A condensed, comparative record for five years for recording events most worthy of remembrance.’ She decided to make it a record for the years 1939-1943, which we now know were the war years. It is nothing like my father’s nearly daily detailed letters from Africa, but as the publisher suggests, it contains notes that she deemed worth remembering. And so I learned that my mother and her mother (resp. 21 and 45 years old), skated from Haarlem to Delft to Rotterdam to Gouda to Den Haag on January 2nd in 1940. Even by car this would be a long trip.

I am just beginning this project, but I am already struck that so far there are only a few references to Hitler and the Germans in those cold winter months of January from 1939-1943. I am sure there will be more to follow.

The next project in the long line of projects that are stacked up like  planes on a runway, is my mother’s journal about her trip from Holland to visit girls scouts in Sweden in August 1937 (she had just turned 19 then), together with a few other Dutch girl scouts. That one will require some advanced deciphering skills.