THE DEATH OF THE LAST VETERANS of the First World War brings with it the disappearance of the few remaining eyewitnesses able to tell us of their experiences of the “great seminal catastrophe of this century.” If these memories are not audio recorded, subsequent generations will have to rely on other media viewed as capable of storing this historic experience authentically. Documents left by veterans fall into this category, such as diaries, letters, or photographs, which either lie unsorted in drawers and cardboard boxes, or have been carefully collated, dated, labeled, and placed into albums. Disturbed from the slumber into which they have fallen following their banishment into storage, these documents have lost their owners and, with them, the personal memories to which they were bound. If they are not destroyed, then these written and pictorial records must be re-read in order to make the information and experiences contained within them accessible once again.

In the current environment of the information era, these letters and photographs are not only being re-housed, but also restored in digital media, as is the case, for example, with the estate of Private William Harry Lamin. His grandson, Bill Lamin, has published his letters on the Internet, ninety years after they were first written. Started in 2006, Bill Lamin's project differs from a classic volume of letters in that it takes the form of a weblog: the grandson not only comments on individual passages and supplements them with photographs from the family album, he also adds links to other websites and makes it possible for the reader to take part in the blog. Bill Lamin is not the only person to make the private correspondence of a frontline soldier of the Great War accessible to the public. Not only soldiers’ letters from both sides, but also innumerable amateur photographs from this time have been re-stored on the Internet and published on popular image hosts, such as Flickr, or on private websites. In the constantly expanding world of digital images, the photographs occupy relatively little space; however, the fact that there are already so many of them indicates just how many more photographs from the First World War may still lie hidden in private archives.