This manuscript is undated. However, its references to World War I place it no earlier than 1918, which is about as early as its recipient (my father, born in 1911) would have been able to read it. A reference to the inflation in Germany following that war implies a somewhat later date, perhaps the late 1920's.
In December of 1977, my mother retyped the memoirs, incorporating the handwritten additions and corrections from the original. She performed some minor editing: the author often wrote long, rambling sentences, some of which she broke up into shorter ones. She may also have corrected a few misspellings.
It is reasonable to assume that she introduced some typos or misspellings of her own. Though I have seen the original (which is still in her possession), I did not have time to compare it in detail to her version.
In July, 1998, my brother scanned my mother's transcription into his computer to produce a series of text files. Naturally the scanning process introduced various glitches, which I have tried to correct through a line-by-line comparison.
The result of this editing was a set of three text files (a single file would have been too big to fit into Notepad). It is nearly an exact transcription of my mother's version. I added "[sic]" here and there to indicate that various misspellings and the like were present in the original. I also indicated which words were underlined, since I had no way to underline in a text file. If for some perverse or scholarly reason you'd like to see these files, email me.
For publication on the Web, I broke up the text into twenty-six pieces, gave each piece a title, and formatted them in HTML. I tried to make each piece a fairly coherent chunk of narrative, but since the original wasn't organized that way, some of the boundaries are a little ragged. I rendered underlining by the use of italics, and added a few footnotes in the form of hyperlinks.
In these Web pages I have corrected misspellings and various evident minor blunders, lest they create irrelevant distractions. In all other respects I have tried to let Bradford Ripley Alden Scott speak in his own words.