They provide a glimpse of the lives of members of a literate Eastern Establishment American family in the early to mid 1900s.

The letters are sometimes from exotic places. But even when mundane, they show where family members were living when.

• Surviving the rigors of boarding school from an early age (JWG4, SG2, CHCG)
• Chatting for hours with FDR on presidential yacht, Sequoia (SG2)
• Climbing the walls and other capers at Cambridge University (SG2)
• Bicycling in Scotland as war looms on the continent (CHCG)
• Navigating the sleepy Washington bureaucracy before the attack at Pearl Harbor brings the US into the war (SG2)
• Serving as a general’s aid in Cairo as the Nazi Afrika Korps drives east toward Suez (SG2)
• Flying in the bomb bay of a B-24 Liberator from Cairo through Tehran to Moscow, for Churchill’s first meeting with Stalin (SG2)
• Keeping Navy secrets as chief gunnery officer on a troop transport in harm’s way in the Pacific (CHCG)
• War bride trying to track her new husband, mostly incommunicado, sent on a secret mission thought to be in China (LTG, SG1, SG2)
• Newlywed life in Southern California as husband trains Marines to shoot before they are sent to assault the beaches in the Pacific (LTG, SG2)
• Traveling on a mysterious government mission in China during its civil war (CHCG)
• Living in Japan during the post-war American occupation (JWG4)
• Enduring hardship in the Korean War (JWG4)
• Reporting Westchester dramas to the family in the early 1950s (HC)
• Starting out in the oil business in Shreveport (CHCG)
• Raising a family on a ranch in 1950s Montana (SG2, LTG)
• Dogs, dogs, dogs (everybody!)