Your Personal Collection
Picture This
You’ve just made yet another move and as you unpack the box labeled MILITARY STUFF, you ask yourself,
What am I keeping this for?
Who would want it?
What can I do with it?
This article will help answer those questions.
WMA’s Official Archive is located at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas and is the repository for our members’ papers, artifacts and more. We encourage you to send your items to TWU Special Collections to become part of our archive which will help tell the true and complete story of women in military aviation.
Here is a list of some of the items you might want to donate:
- Uniforms - not your entire wardrobe but perhaps one of each type
- Logbooks
- Pilots license and certificates
- Awards and decorations (medals, ribbons, narratives)
- Photographs, newspaper and magazine articles about yourself
- Military discharge paperwork
- Flight artifacts (e.g., helmet, knee board, whiz wheel)
- Memorabilia (e.g., end-of-tour awards, patches, posters)
- Correspondence, professional and personal (letters and postcards written home)
- Diaries, journals, travelogues or notes you took on your military career
- Military orders, personnel records
- Military resume/vita
- Military aviation events - programs, notes, photographs
- Articles you have written - include specifics of publication
- Photographs - identify date, location, event, people
- Aircraft models or posters of the planes you flew
- Speeches you have written and/or given - include event date and location
*If you are not ready to part with an original document or photo, you may send in a copy but suggest you include information on where the original is kept. If you have donated some of your military things to local organizations, please annotate what and where it is. This will help future researchers find your artifacts.
To Donate Items
Please compile a list of each item you send and include details such as date, time and significance. Your list will be used to compose a gift agreement which serves as verification of your (charitable) donation.
You may also include specific instructions for certain items (e.g., do not make personal diaries publicly available until after my death, or, photographs of my children are not to be used without my express permission).
Contact the Historical Committee as you assemble your donation so we can provide guidance on where to send your items. Artifacts will go directly to TWU, most files will come to the committee so we can create an expanded inventory before archiving.
If you have additional questions, feel free to contact the Historical Committee, History@womenmilitaryaviators.org or the TWU Special Collections staff at (940) 898-3743.