Krieg-Campbell Family Archives

About this Archive

This archive contains papers of certain ancesors of William Laurence Krieg and Laura Philinda Campbell (ex-Jones) Krieg. It is presented publicly but informally, with no pretensions of being a complete or professional work of scholarship.

William Laurence Krieg, born 1913-10-11 in Newark, Ohio, was the son of Laurence Montgomery Krieg and Helen Crane Krieg. He attended Dartmouth College and Tufts University; and became a Foreign Service Office in 1939, having served an internship in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1938. He served in Milan, Italy; Lagos, Nigeria; Washington, D.C. at the State Department, and later as a student at the National War College; in Caracas, Venezuela; Guatemala City, Guatemala; and Santiago, Chile. After his official retirement, he served in contract research positions at the U.S. Department of State, as lecturer at Georgetown University and the Foreign Service Institute. He retired "completely" and took up residence in Sarasota, Florida, where he passed away in 2010 at the age of 97.

Laura Philinda Campbell was born 1917-09-02 in Maplewood, New Jersey, daughter of John Wood Cambell, Sr., and Dorothy Strahorn. She attended Swarthmore College with summers in Mexico and Paris for language and cultural education. In Paris, she was prevented from returning at the end of the summer by the beginning of World War II. There she met her first husband, James Jones, of Jacksonville, Florida. In 1942 they were divorced; she then married William Krieg in Lagos, Nigeria. They were married for the rest of her life, 65 years during which she accompanied William, and later their children Laurence John Krieg, Helen Middleton Krieg Came, and Laura Campbell Krieg Morris. Laura Philinda passed away in Sarasota, Florida at the age of 92, in 2009.

Laura Philinda's brother, John Wood Campbell Jr., was a noted science fiction author and editor. This archive contains none of his writing at this time, though a small number of letters to and from him will be scanned and made available as time permits. For more information about John Wood Campbell, Jr., see his Wikipedia article and the ISFDB index of his published writings.

More about the Krieg-Campbell Family Archive Project

Family Archive Contents

The table at the end of this page describes each set of documents I've found with the approximate number in the set, but processing them for online viewing is far from complete. The list immediately below shows which sets currently have viewable materials:

• Family History Miscellany: 132 Photos and 14 documents
• Before 1900: 6 Photos and 24 documents
• 1930-1939 miscellaneous: 4 Photos and 20 documents
• 1931-1937 University period: 123 Documents covering William's four years at Dartmouth College
• 1938-1939 William in Stuttgart, Germany: 23 Photos and 40 documents
• 1940-1949 miscellaneous: 161 Documents
• 1940-1941 William in Milan, Italy: 71 Photos and 92 documents
• 1940-1944 William and Janie Correspondence between William and his sister, Jeannette Krieg Drake: 52 documents prepared, but will not be published during the life of either of the correspondents
• 1939-1940 Philinda in France: 1 Photo and 81 documents
• 1941-1944 William (and later Philinda) in Lagos : 102 Photos and 382 documents
• 1951-1952 John Wood Campbell, Sr. Travel account: 1 Photo and 3 documents

Progress

April 2021: I visited sister Helen and her husband Dave Came for a few days. Together, we were able to scan many interesting family documents in Helen's collection. These include:

• Twenty-three letters between Dr. Eugene Beauharnais Harrison and his wife Mary, March 1862 to December 1863. During that period, Dr. Harrison served as a Division Surgeon in the Union Army. There are many more, but our time together was limited and the letters have been stored folded for several decades, making it challenging to unfold and scan them without damage. These letters will have to be individually transcribed, a slow process, of course.
• Twelve photos (all well labeled but challenging to digitize) and two documentary memorabilia from the Harrison family.
• Letters from Laura Philinda Campbell Krieg to family and friends between October 1948 and August 1950. There are 280 scanned pages consisting of about 100 letters. These were written while William was stationed in Washington and the family lived in Bethesda, Maryland, after returning from Caracas, Venezuela, and before being posted to Guatemala in 1951. I believe there are no further family letters until Guatemala, perhaps because of Philinda's very challenging pregnancy (August 1950 to April 6, 1951). Correction/Update (2022-07-12): A group of about 25 letters from Philinda turned up in my files (Laurence's) dating from August, 1950 to July, 1951, and will soon be made available.

July 2021: William's University period letters are now complete - Junior and Senior years added.

• Total available for viewing as of July 2021: 866 documents
• Awaiting processing: approximately 918 letter-equivalents

July 2022: Philinda's letters from Bethesda, Maryland, between 1948 and 1950 have been processed. Most of this set of letters (carbon copies) are in the care of her daughter Helen Came, in Sarasota, Florida. During my (Laurence's) visit in April 2021, Helen and I engaged in two marathon days of letter-scanning. Philinda's letters are mostly in good physical shape, making it possible to scan most of them through the automatic document feeder of the Came's printer/scanner. After leaving digital copies on Helen's computer, I returned home with 280 photo copy files, which have now been processed into about 150 letters.

As noted in the correction above, there is another group of about 25 letters that were not passed on to Helen before William's death in 2010. These are therefore in Laurence's files, and are being processed as of this writing

Letters from this period are available in two sections:

• Bethesda letters from 1948 and 1949
• Bethesda letters from 1950 and 1951, currently in process

The E. B. Harrison documents mentioend above (April 2021) are still in process, and will require more time because they are primarily hand-written. My wife Martha has kindly and skilfully transcribed them; following completion of the 1950-51 letters, these will be arranged in facing-page display, with originals on one side and transcriptions on the other.

Krieg-Campbell Family papers

About the Krieg-Campbell Family Archive Project

In 2010, my dear Dad, William Laurence Krieg, passed away, and I inherited (among other things) the contents of the bottom drawer of his desk. This turned out to be stuffed with old letters and papers. A small black box had the records of Wm. Krieg & Sons Carriage Makers, Buckeystown, Maryland. These include William (Wilhelm) Krieg's naturalization papers, from 1846. I assigned the care and exploration of this box to my sister Helen Came, who is the genealogist of the family.

Most of the papers and photos are more recent, of course. Both my mother, Laura Philinda Campbell (Jones) Krieg, and my father, William Laurence Krieg, were prolific letter-writers for much of their lives, and both lived separately and together in interesting places, during exciting times. Accounts of war and revolutions are interspersed with the daily details of living in other lands.

When I found the stash of old papers, they were in compact bundles, occupying as little space as possible. I didn't have time to go through them before Dad's condo in Sarasota had to be sold, and I had to get on with my own life in Michigan. But when I had a chance to poke a little deeper, I realized what a treasure I had, and that they needed to be preserved carefully, cataloged, and digitized. The first thing I did was to order six filing cabinets for them and other estate-related materials.

There are over 2,700 "letter-equivalents", including lecture notes, papers, and a couple of books. Cataloging and digitizing them would be a project for several lifetimes, so I have little hope of doing more than a fraction of them. And there are many, many photos, newspaper clippings, and souvenirs. A tall order. So far, I have completed two series: from my father in Milan, Italy (1940-1941) and from my mother in Paris (1939-1941).

So far, the Milan and France letters have been transcribed from their original form (hand-written or typed) into uniform text-searchable format and saved as PDF files. These are being uploaded currently.

Carbon copies of another set of letters, these written by Laura Philinda in Guatemala between 1951 and 1954, were bound as a book. In 1981 I unbound them, photocopied them, and distributed copies to my sisters Helen and Laura. Together with my wife and children, we typed letters from 1951 through part of 1953 by hand into Microsoft Word. With relatively little labor, these can be converted to uniform format as PDFs and uploaded fairly soon.

However, transcription is not a realistic option for completing the digitization of the rest of the collection, so they will be scanned and uploaded as images. As time and interest allow, the process of rendering the scans as text can be completed. Work is ongoing, so if this interests you, please check back occasionally.