Thirty-five years ago this month, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on
the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated. Three years later,
in 1985, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund donated its records to the
Library of Congress. But the National Archives actually plays a very
important role in them—a role I was not aware of until I prepared a
program this month for a group of high school students and their
teachers.
I started by doing some research in the records, mostly to get a
sense of their composition and arrangement in order to describe them to
the students. I had scanned the finding aid and asked for six different boxes to be pulled. One that caught my eye was titled simply “spelling verification.”
I suspected the files in that particular box would have something to do
with how the spelling of the thousands of names to be engraved on the
memorial wall would be checked for accuracy. I was right. The box
contained a sobering collection of printed and hand-written names of
America’s fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen and women. Page after page
contained checkmarks or corrections in red ink. ... [mehr] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/11/veterans-history-spell-checking-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial/
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