The 1940s Charles Leonard Eesley letter collection

What this collection is

Roberta Burnes holds, in her own description from a July 2019 family email, “a huge collection of mostly 1940s letters [that] may shed some light on this” — this being the unresolved family-history question of how Stella Sunn came to live with the Eesleys in Bexley, Ohio. The letters are written almost entirely in the hand of her grandfather Charles Leonard Eesley, the patriarch of the line through Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley. His handwriting, Roberta has said, is “almost indecipherable.” The collection has not been read, transcribed, scanned, or digitized. Nothing from it appears on this site.

It is, at the same time, the single most consequential undeciphered source still to come for the Eesley side of this archive.

Why the 1940s matter to this archive

The decade the collection spans is the decade the family’s moral history bends on. The four arcs it almost certainly touches:

The Cabanatuan death. Uncle Lyle Eesley died at the Cabanatuan prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines on 25 July 1942 — Charles Leonard’s son and Will’s brother. The wartime correspondence Charles Leonard kept with his scattered children would have moved through that event, before and after. None of what he wrote about losing Lyle has yet been read.

The Stella arrival. Stella Sunn came to live with the Eesleys in Bexley within months of Lyle’s death. The connection between the two — established in this archive only through Roberta’s own 2019 reconstruction (“she may have joined the scene after Lyle died”) — would be documented in any letters Charles Leonard wrote about taking Stella in. The decision that turned what had been two separate chapters into one connected story is, on present knowledge, undocumented in primary sources.

The scattered children. Charles Leonard’s eight children were grown by 1940. Leonard “Len” Eesley was in Plainwell, Michigan; Donald Eesley was in his own household; Mary Eesley Bean was building her register-keeping life; Wilbur “Will” Eesley was establishing himself in central Ohio; Helen Eesley Burnes was the youngest, just sixteen at the war’s start. The wartime correspondence between Charles Leonard and his children would have moved across all of these households, in the years they were separated by war work, by school, by careers, by the war itself.

The Bexley years. Charles Leonard was at home in Bexley, with Lillie Dale, through the decade. The letters are the record of what he was thinking, hearing, and saying to his children from that kitchen.

The provenance — Aunt Helen’s basement, Silver Spring, c. 1976

A major Roberta email of June 2026 filled in the provenance chain. The story, as her sister Barb Burnes Hester confirmed:

“After Uncle Leonard died (1976?), I recall Aunt Helen and my mother and I going down to the basement at Len and Helen’s place in Silver Spring. There, Aunt Helen showed us shoebox after shoebox filled with letters between Len, Lilly and Charles, and sometimes Len’s wife Helen. Aunt Helen asked Mom whether she wanted them, saying that her boys weren’t interested. Mom took the letters home with us. When Mom died in 2000, the letters were divvied up between the siblings who wanted them. Barb made copies of them before that happened.”

The chain in summary:

The shoebox basement, c. 1976 — After Leonard “Len” Eesley’s death (~1976), his widow Helen and Roberta’s mother Helen Burnes (née Eesley) walked through the basement of Len + Helen’s Silver Spring, Maryland house. Helen showed them shoeboxes of letters — correspondence between Len, his mother Lillie Dale, his father Charles Leonard, and “sometimes Len’s wife Helen.” Aunt Helen’s “boys weren’t interested”; she asked Helen Burnes if she wanted them. Helen Burnes said yes and took them home.
The 2000 division — When Helen Burnes died in 2000, the letters were divided among her siblings who wanted them. Before the division, Roberta’s older sister Barb Burnes Hester made photocopies of the entire collection.
The Barb photocopy set — Barb’s photocopies are now the most complete bound version of the collection — the original letters are scattered across the Burnes siblings since 2000, but Barb’s copy-set holds them all in one place.

Barb is the one living transcriber — Charles Leonard’s palsy/tremor

A second crucial piece from the June 2026 email: Barb’s own ability to read the handwriting. Per Roberta:

“Barb told me that Grandpa Eesley had a palsy or tremor in his hand that made his handwriting indecipherable, but she says she is able to read it because she grew up reading it. (She told me that my earlier transcriptions of his handwriting had a high error rate and that she’s the only one living who can read it, lol!)”

This is the breakthrough on the reading problem the earlier sections of this page described. The handwriting’s near-indecipherability is now understood to come from a specific medical cause — Charles Leonard had a palsy or tremor in his hand that progressively degraded his cursive across the 1940s. Barb learned to read that hand by growing up around it. She is the only living family member who can do it reliably.

Barb is “interested in getting together with me or one of her grandkids to transcribe these letters, soon!” — the single most consequential family-archive development of this decade.

The book idea — Roberta and Barb’s vision

The June 2026 email closes the description with a goal:

“We think there’s enough material here to create a book, sprinkled with photos.”

A book-length anthology of the 1940s Charles Leonard letter collection — transcribed by Barb, edited by Roberta, illustrated with photographs from the family albums — would be the culminating publication of the Eesley-side correspondence record, the way Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1990 Heritage is the culminating publication of the Wildermuth side.

The Vietnam letters Charlie wrote home to Terrie from 1969-1971, already published in part on this archive at Letters from Vietnam, would sit as the next-generation companion volume to Charles Leonard’s 1940s letters — two letter-keepers in one family across two wars, both preserved, both being read.

The two parallel research threads

Roberta’s June 2026 email also surfaces two other documentary holdings beyond the letters themselves:

The c. 1999 photo-archive CD-ROMs and the printed key book

Roberta and her sister Barb, working through their mother Helen Burnes’s photograph collection in the 1990s, digitized the entire collection onto CD-ROMs. Per Roberta, the original photographs were divided among Helen’s children after her 2000 death; the CD-ROM set was meant to preserve the collection intact, digitally. Roberta no longer has a CD-ROM drive but she still holds the printed key book that pairs each digitized photograph with an identifying label.

If the CD-ROMs are still readable, they would surface the digitized version of every photograph this archive has been able to reference only through Roberta’s individual scans — a complete pre-Burnes-sibling-division digital record of the Helen Burnes photograph holdings.

The reel-to-reel recordings of Charles Leonard and Don, Narberth, PA, late 1960s

A more haunting research thread:

“I also have recordings of Grandpa Eesley, Don, and possibly others telling family stories, recorded in the late 1960s in their home in Narberth, PA. Unfortunately, these were recorded on reel-to-reel tape — a good format for preservation, but they were all combined many years ago into one large reel, and the combining was all out of order. The tape will take some work to access and figure out which part is which.”

Charles Leonard Eesley and Donald “Don” Eesley telling family stories on reel-to-reel tape in the late 1960s at Narberth, Pennsylvania. These are the voices of two of the Eesley patriarchs of the line, captured at the same time the Maggie Eesley Four Generations deck was being assembled and the family-history project was in its first organized phase. The combining-out-of-order is a tractable problem with current digital audio tools; the priority would be (a) getting the reel digitized into individual files, (b) timestamping voices and topics across the audio, and (c) identifying which sections of “out-of-order combining” belong together.

Audio of Charles Leonard’s actual voice — the man whose 1922 letter to Len has surfaced as the earliest item in the archive, whose 1940s shoebox correspondence Barb is about to transcribe — would be one of the most precious artifacts the family could surface.

What is known about the physical collection

Until June 2026, Roberta’s 2019 family email was the source of every claim this archive could make about the collection. The June 2026 email substantially expanded that:

The collection is large (“a huge collection”).
It is mostly from the 1940s.
Most of it is in Charles Leonard’s own hand.
His handwriting is “almost indecipherable.”
It has not been read or transcribed.

What this archive does not know, on present evidence:

The precise number of letters.
The exact date range within the decade.
The recipients — most likely Charles Leonard’s adult children scattered across the country, but no individual letter has been confirmed.
Whether the collection includes correspondence received by Charles Leonard (letters from his children to him) or only letters written by him that came back into the family’s keeping after his death.
Whether the collection includes any letters from or about Lyle in the months before Cabanatuan.
Whether the collection includes any letters about Stella’s arrival.

The undeciphered handwriting is the obstacle. Charles Leonard wrote a hand that even his own granddaughter, the keeper of the collection, cannot read at speed.

The reading problem

A future reader of this collection would need either:

A trained paleographer or genealogist accustomed to early-twentieth-century cursive — the standard professional approach for handwritten correspondence of the 1930s–1950s, where the hand is legible but slow and the corpus is large.

Or a careful family-history pass — a reader who already knows the names, places, and events well enough to fill in around the indecipherable words, the way Robert Earl Wildermuth’s transcribers did with his 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage memoir.

Or a digitization-and-OCR pass — handwritten-text recognition has reached the point where letters of this era can be partially auto-transcribed, with the indecipherable runs flagged for human review.

None of these readings has happened. The single most likely next step is a small pilot scan — five to ten letters lifted from the collection and digitized at high resolution, so a reading pass can be attempted on a manageable sample before committing to the full collection.

Status on this archive

Held by Roberta. Not yet on this site in any form. Referenced on the homepage and on Roberta’s page as the most consequential source still to come, with no further claim made about its contents.

If at some point Roberta were willing to do a partial scan-and-transcribe pass — even of a handful of letters — the resulting documents would land here, each as its own letter entry under this parent collection, the way the Vietnam letters of the next generation are organized under Letters from Vietnam. The collection would then take its place as the Eesley-side equivalent of that Vietnam corpus, with the Cabanatuan and Stella threads as the load-bearing narratives the way Charlie’s tour is the load-bearing narrative there.

The collection’s existence is the thing this page records. The contents are still waiting.

June 2026 update — the first item lifted from the collection

In June 2026 Roberta began the partial-scan-and-transcribe pass described above. The first item she sent across is not a 1940s letter at all but the earliest item in the collection — a 1922 letter from Lillie Dale to her oldest son Leonard:

Letter to Leonard, 3 September 1922 — Lillie Dale on Will’s broken leg and asking Len to visit Chant in California

The 1922 letter pushes the collection’s documented date range back nearly two decades from the previously-described “1940s” frame, and establishes that pre-1940 items are in the box and may surface as Roberta continues the pass. The per-letter catalog — with full publication or metadata-only entries per the letters-from-vietnam curation policy — begins with the 3 September 1922 item; more entries will land here as Roberta sends them across.

Sources: Roberta Burnes Walker’s July 2019 family email — the original description of the collection. Roberta’s June 2026 emails sending the 3 September 1922 letter as the first lifted item, surfacing the c. 1976 Aunt Helen / Silver Spring basement provenance story confirmed by her sister Barb Burnes Hester, the Charles Leonard palsy/tremor handwriting explanation, Barb’s role as the only living family member who can read the hand, the book-with-photos goal, the c. 1999 photo-archive CD-ROM digitization, and the late-1960s Narberth PA reel-to-reel recordings of Charles Leonard and Don.