On September 16th 1990, Kip recorded the following:
Kari, Krista and I went to Bountiful and met my parents, Lane, and Father’s sister (my aunt) Catherine and her husband Drew Holman. After dinner we started going through some of grandma Twitchell’s old things.Fortunately, Grandma kept her letters and she loved to write letters. She kept letters from her Father and Mother and her Father-in-law and Mother-in-Law. From these letters I will be able to make a very nice history about many people.
On the following Sunday February 17 I wrote:
I have been writing a history of John Mac and Ruth Batchelder Twitchell. Actually, I am only the editor, in that they left a wealth of knowledge about themselves…
It began when I went to Nashville Tenne. I found a book, in a very large bookstore, in an area of town I visited only briefly, about a strange subject “Eleanor of Aquitaine.” We saw a movie about her, so I bought it for Kari.
Kari and I read the book together, and found it very interesting. It is written well enough, and factual enough to be a text book for a college history class. As I read, I thought of the letters of Mac’s and Ruth’s we had recently discovered in Ruth’s old chest.
I read the letters, and found them very interesting.
I found in a closet at my work a Compaq portable computer. This was before I owned a computer. It was not very functional even at this date, perhaps being 5 or more years old. It was what was terms a sewing machine style computer, with a 5 inch monitor on one end and two floppy disk drives, one on top of each other beside it. But I was able to get it working, and it did enough for me to be able to transcribe these letters we had discovered at Aunt Catherine’s.
The following were the results of my transcription, updated in nearly no way in the thirty years since then except by opening them in a word processor and saving them in the current document format every ten or so years in the years since.
The Ruth Batchelder and John Mac Twitchell Letters
Written and told by John Mac and Ruth Batchelder Twitchell, and their children Robert M. Twitchell and Catherine J. Twitchell Holman
Transcribed by Kip M. Twitchell