Jenny Mueller of Barnhart has spent the past two years working on a blog that recounts her great-grandparents’ lives during World War II and sets up a mystery she will end with her final post on New Year’s Eve.
As part of the blog, she shared 336 letters written between 1944 and 1945, most of them written by her late great-grandparents, Army veteran Russell Lee and his wife, Lucille Lee.
The first letter Mueller posted was her great-grandfather’s draft notice dated Jan. 19, 1944, and it was posted on the corresponding date in 2021, on Jan. 19. She posted the last of her great-grandparents’ letters earlier this month, on Dec. 8.
That letter was dated Dec. 8, 1945, and Russell sent it from Southampton, England, to his wife, telling her he would be leaving for home soon. That letter leads to the blog’s big question about whether Mueller’s great-grandfather would make it home in time for Christmas. She won’t answer that question until Dec. 31, bringing her blog to its conclusion.
The blog, titled “Lee Letters of WWII,” can be found on her website at leelettersofwwii.com.
“The letters were found after my great-grandparents passed away,” said Mueller, 35, who grew up in Imperial and graduated from Seckman High School in 2005. “After I read them, I didn’t just want to put them back. There was a whole story of their time, and it was very meaningful to me.
“I thought I needed to figure out what to do with them, so they were not put away and so other people in our family could read them. That led to the decision to do the blog.”
Even though Mueller’s Dec. 8 blog entry was the last one to feature a letter, she will share a few more posts to let people know how Russell’s journey from Europe to Lesterville ended.
“I recently found some new documents that Russell kept,” Mueller said. “He boarded the USS Enterprise on Dec. 13 (1945) in England. I created a couple posts following him through that part of his journey to landing in New York. For a long time, I didn’t know the day (Russell returned home).”
Mueller also created a Facebook page for “Lee Letters of WWII” to provide links to letters posted on the website.
“I thought it was so cool she took this time to dedicate to her family’s history and the project,” said Mueller’s longtime friend, Angela Chellew, 35, of Virginia Beach, Va., who graduated from Seckman High with Mueller. “I could tell she was determined and committed to following it through.”
The blog
Mueller said she first read the letters in 2018. Her great-grandmother died in 2001 and her great-grandfather died in 2004.
She said her great-grandparents started dating and were married in 1939, the same year the war started in Europe. Her grandfather, Larry Dean Lee, was born May 29, 1941, and in December of that year, the U.S. joined the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Mueller’s blog includes 272 posts featuring 286 letters from Russell. There are 20 posts featuring 27 letters from Lucille.
The blog also includes letters from other family members and friends and information describing Russell’s journey in the Army from boot camp to Europe and back to the U.S.
Mueller said there are more letters from Russell because Lucille was able to keep the ones he wrote her, while Russell had to destroy some of Lucille’s letters.
“He wrote in some of his letters, ‘I hated to but I had to burn a bunch of your letters today’ because he couldn’t carry them,” Mueller said.
She said she started transcribing the letters in the summer of 2020 and began building the website in October 2020. She said she has no idea how much time she spent on the blog.
“Thankfully, they both had incredible penmanship. There were some that were difficult, but for the most part, they were pretty clear,” Mueller said. “I was working three to four hours for each post at first. Toward the end, I got it down to one to two hours for each post.”
Mueller also shared her thoughts about what was happening in her great-grandparents’ lives on her blog, adding context to each letter and including newspaper clippings from the day of each post.
“I think it is awesome that she kind of breaks down each letter. Jenny is a great writer,” Chellew said. “For me, I thought it was cool to read her thoughts and highlights. You learn a lot more about things by reading her overview of the letters. She explains where (Russell) would have been and relates things from then to now.”
Mueller said even though her work on the blog was time consuming, she received a lot of support from her husband, Jake, 36, and son, Russell Lee, 10, who is named after her great-grandfather.
Impact
Mueller said there are too many good letters to pick her favorite but one that stood out for her was Russell’s letter from March 5, 1944, when he wrote about hoping his son, Larry, would remember him. Another memorable one was from Aug. 30, 1945, when Russell describes how he was wounded in September 1944. In that letter, Russell said he did not remember much about the incident, adding that “I was there and the doctors were looking at me and a chaplain walked over and said, ‘It’s all over now isn’t it?’ I didn’t know what he meant. I thought he meant the war was over or that I was going to die.”
“There are letters written on or around events that changed our world, like D-Day, the death of (President Franklin Roosevelt), the atomic bomb, Hitler’s suicide, etc.,” Mueller said. “Few of these letters are exceptionally exciting, but that’s the point. It’s just like the things we deal with every day. These were just the things that were happening in the world that they had to deal with, that everyone had to deal with.”
Chellew said the letters have special meaning to her because her husband, Ben Chellew, is a Petty Officer First Class in the U.S. Navy.
“It made me think about how grateful I am to have some of the things in my life that you didn’t have then,” said Chellew, whose father-in-law is retired Fox C-6 School District Superintendent and current Fox Board of Education vice president Jim Chellew. “Things like social media have made it easier to communicate with my spouse when he is deployed. You can share pictures, and you can share emails. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like back then to be a military spouse to have kids and having to wait to hear things.”
Spreading the word
Mueller traveled to San Antonio over Veterans Day weekend this year to speak at a reunion of the U.S. Army 90th Division Association. Her great-grandfather was with that division when he was wounded.
Another speaker at the reunion included Helen Patton, the granddaughter of Gen. George S. Patton.
“I got to hear all of these other stories about men who fought with him or during the same time as him,” Mueller said. “I learned about the division as a whole. It was a fulfilling experience, especially after going through this the last few years.”
Mueller said she may have found another outlet for sharing her great-grandparent’s story because Patton talked at the reunion about starting a podcast to share stories from World War II and the possibility of having Mueller read a letter on it.
“I can’t imagine in their wildest dreams that my great-grandparents would think that Gen. Patton’s granddaughter would be in a room listening to me talk about their story. That was a wow moment,” Mueller said. “I told her I would like to be involved (in the podcast). There is nothing set in stone, but it would be icing on the cake if that happens.”