Do you ever wonder where Google gets all the answers? Behind the billions of questions we humans have, there are people combing through and preserving stacks of primary source material to deliver those answers in a digestible form. One of those people works as the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Reference and Outreach Archivist. Russ Horton, who grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, has the primary job of helping researchers learn more about Wisconsin’s veterans. Those researchers include genealogists working on family trees, local historians studying the veterans in their community, students researching for projects, and professional historians writing books. He also intakes collection donations.
Although the letters and photographs Horton cares for may not be as outwardly exciting to visitors as the weaponry, clothing, mannequins and shiny equipment in the galleries, the documents are what gives meaning to those objects and help us represent history through our veterans’ experiences. Through the collections of letters, papers, photographs and books, Horton reads the life experiences of people he’s never met.
His favorite story in the collection involves a young soldier from Oshkosh who was wounded on Saipan and was sent to a hospital in Missouri to recover. A young woman from his hometown began writing him letters while he was recuperating, and over the course of a year of exchanging letters, they fell in love and decided to get married. These people are Horton's grandparents.
Horton says, “What’s held in the archives allows us to connect with veterans as individuals, to read them describing their experiences and hopes and fears in the moment, to see them as young people who were not much different than we were as young people. It’s through the Research Center that we can really connect with these veterans.”
Taking great pride in his work, Horton feels a strong responsibility in keeping our veterans’ stories alive for future generations of family and for researchers. He believes, “ensuring the stories and sacrifices of Wisconsin veterans are remembered is an incredibly important duty and I feel privileged to be able to contribute to that charge for the past twenty-one years.”
