Library to honor Veterans Day with wartime letters program and historical resources

In honor of Veterans Day, join the library for a special presentation featuring wartime letters from Ohioans throughout history, research your family’s military history, and read or listen to a veteran’s story. Thank you to all veterans for your sacrifice and service. Happy Veterans Day.

 Letters Home program

Letters served as the main source of communications between soldiers, nurses, and other military support personnel and their communities during the American wars of the 18th through mid-20th centuries. The written word connected the individuals far from home to their families and friends, providing comfort, support and the exchange of news.

Walsh University professor Kelly Mezurek will be at the main library to present Letters Home: Ohioans and Their Wartime Correspondence Monday, Nov. 10 at 1:30 p.m. From the earliest days of Ohio’s statehood to the Vietnam War, this talk will illuminate how private wartime letters provided insight into the personal, lived experiences of Ohioans. Registration is required for this program and may be completed on the library’s website or by calling 740-622-0956.

Fold3

Fold3 by Ancestry is an online research database that combines military records with deep first-person content including biographies, letters and more. More than 500 million searchable records span hundreds of years, with coverage including the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I and II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, recent wars, international records and more.

Fold3 is available for free with a Coshocton County Library card and may be accessed through the Ohio Web Library under Digital Resources on the library’s website. On the Fold3 homepage, searches may be filtered by name, location, military branch, war and more. Search results will include text, images and digitized records, with content available to enlarge, print, save or share on social media. Unique to Fold3, users also may upload specific images and text to create a customized memorial page.

Veterans’ stories

Each of the following books is available to borrow at the library or digitally through the Libby app:

—“We Are Soldiers Still” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L Galloway (2024). In this sequel to the classic bestselling memoir “We Were Soldiers Once,” the co-authors bring readers up to date on the cadre of soldiers introduced in their first book. Returning to Vietnam’s la Drang Valley more than four decades after the battle, Moore and Galloway renew their relationships with 10 American veterans of the fabled conflict and with former adversaries, exploring how the war changed them all.

—“Crossings” by Jon Kerstetter (2017). This searing, beautifully told memoir by a Native American doctor tells the trials of being a doctor-soldier in the Iraq War, and then after suffering a stroke that left his life irrevocably changed, his struggles to overcome the new limits of his body, mind and identity.

—“Five Lieutenants” by James Carl Nelson (2012) tells the story of five young Harvard men who took up the call to arms in spring 1917 and met differing fates in the maelstrom of battle on the Western Front in 1918. Drawing on the subjects’ intimate, eloquent and uncensored letters and memoirs, this is a fascinating microcosm of the American experience in World War I.