Meet the volunteers behind Letters 1916-1923
The Letters 1916-1923 project team is delighted to feature the profiles of some of our contributors and users. Crowdsourcing projects, like this one, rely on their users to make them a success. We are very grateful to anyone who has contributed to the archive by transcribing or uploading letters and we will be highlighting some of these contributions through personal profiles.
Meet the people behind Letters 1916-1923 and read our latest community posts, or click on one of the links below.
If you contribute to the project and would like your profile to be featured on the site, please email letters1916@gmail.com for more information.
Some of our contributors since 2013
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Featured Profile: Nicole Lottig
Nicole Lottig is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Gender Studies. She also studied at Maynooth University during the Spring of 2015, obtaining a Certificate in Irish Studies. During her last semester of college, she got involved in Digital Humanities and fell in love!
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Featured Profile: Letters 1916 interns: Mattie & Emily
In Summer 2016, the Letters of 1916 and An Foras Feasa project hosted two interns, Mattie and Emily, from Beloit College in Wisconsin, USA.
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New Featured Profile Added: Tammy Sellner
We have just added Tammy Sellner’s profile to our ‘Featured Profiles’ section. Before emigrating to America, Tammy Sellner’s ancestors hailed from Ireland. Last winter, Tammy decided to visit Dublin to see where they had come from originally.
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New Featured Profile: Michael Gorman
Michael Gorman is the eldest son of Michael and Susan Gorman. He was born in 1927 and lived all his life, until his marriage in 1970, in the family home at 40 Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin. He was the middle child of three, with an elder sister Joan and younger brother Gerald. Michael joined the Irish Tourist Board in 1952 and worked there in various roles until his retirement in 1972. Michael heard about the Letters of 1916 project from his son and added a selection of his parents’ letters which were written between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916. Read more about Michael’s collection here.
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New featured profile: Tessa Finn, Letter Collection Contributor
Tessa Finn was brought up in Dublin and describes herself as a returned wanderer, living back in Dublin since 2007, after spending 25 years abroad.She studied in UCD and then worked in medical research for many years in London and Berlin. She then worked for 10 years in a Californian Winery. Now, she works for an American medical devices company in Dublin. Tessa came to the Letters of 1916 launch in September 2013 with a folder containing around 100 letters. These letters were written in 1916 by May Fay and James Finn, Tessa’s grandparents. May and James were writing to each other regularly from January until they married in June of 1916.
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Featured Profile: Philip Costello
Philip Costello retired in 2012, having completed 40 years in the Public Service. He is married to Catherine and they have four children and two grandchildren. Since his retirement he has been volunteering at various festivals in Dublin as well as the Letters 1916 Project.
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Featured Transcriber: Sandra Butler
Sandra Butler is a former student of psychology at Maynooth University and is planning on returning to complete a Masters next year. Sandra is from Kildare and is a single mother of two wonderful daughters. She found out about the project on the volunteer.ie website and thought that it was definitely something that was right up her alley.
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Profile: Samantha Simpson
Sam Simpson is a graduate (masters) student studying comparative history at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Originally from Pocatello, Idaho, Sam received her Bachelor’s Degree in History from Idaho State University in 2015. Sam is an avid traveler and has always had a love for Irish history.
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Profile: Donna Alexander
One of our Cork-based collaborators is Dr Donna Alexander (@americasstudies) from University College Cork. At our Cork launch event in November 2015, Donna gave a very interesting talk about how she uses Letters of 1916 with her MA students.
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Contributor Profile: Genevieve Harden
Genevieve Harden came to live in Ireland from England in 1998 as part of a European Voluntary Service programme called “Artist Against Exclusion”. Since then she has worked on public art projects and teaching in Dublin. Genevieve now lives in Co.Wicklow with her husband and two children. She is currently working on a Masters in Socially Engaged Art in N.C.A.D.
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Featured Contributor: Noreen Bowden
Noreen Bowden is an Irish-American living in New York who spent nearly fifteen years living and working in Ireland. She has been a web editor since 1995, mainly on sites aimed at the Irish abroad She started a website called GlobalIrish.ie about six years ago that deals with various aspects of emigration and diaspora. Noreen told us about her collection and how she got involved with the Letters 1916-1923 project.