Estelle Garner Ptaszynski Collection
Content Description
The collection includes an oral history transcript, 5 February 1999; various photographs of Ptaszynski’s Army Nurse Corps service as a surgical nurse, 1943-1944.
Dates
- circa 1943-1999
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research.
Conditions Governing Use
Copyright is retained by the creators of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information. Please see our Sensitive Materials Statement.
Biographical / Historical
Estelle Garner Ptaszynski (1917-2006) of Seagrove, North Carolina, a member of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) from 1943 to 1945. She also served as a surgical nurse for many years at hospitals in Connecticut and North Carolina. Estelle Garner Ptaszynski was born on 7 December, 1917, in Seagrove, North Carolina. She attended Elsie Academy in Robbins, North Carolina, and Campbell College in Buies Creek, North Carolina. She graduated from nurse's training at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1940 and became a surgical nurse in the hospital's operating room.
In January 1943, Ptaszynski joined the Army Nurse Corps. She spent eight months at Camp Butner near Durham, North Carolina, and then went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Kilmer in New Jersey for overseas training. Ptaszynski sailed to England on the SS Mauritania with the 305th Station Hospital in September 1943. She spent several months with the hospital on the Longleat Castle estate near Warminster, England, before moving to Oxford for one month. Ptaszynski moved with the hospital to Southampton in the spring of 1944 and remained there until August 1945.
She returned to the United States and was discharged from Fort Bragg in November 1945. Ptaszynski met her husband, Ed, while in the service. They married in February 1946 and moved to Connecticut, where they lived for twenty-nine years.
Ptaszynski resumed her work as a surgical nurse when her children reached elementary school age, and continued her nursing career for several years after the family moved back to North Carolina and settled in Troy. Ptaszynski died in 2006.
Extent
0.21 Linear Feet (2 folders)
Language of Materials
English
Metadata Rights Declarations
- License: This record is made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons license.
Condition Description
The condition is good.
Offensive Language Statement
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Processing Information
Processed by Matthew McCarthy.
- United States. Army -- Nurses
- United States. Army -- Nurses -- Interviews
- United States. Army Nurse Corps -- Interviews
- United States. Army Nurse Corps -- Military life
- United States. Army Nurse Corps -- Women
- Women and the military
- Women veterans
- World War, 1939-1945
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Participation, Female
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Women
- Title
- Estelle Garner Ptaszynski Collection
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Matthew McCarthy
- Date
- 2022 May
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
- Language of description note
- eng
Repository Details
Part of the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives Repository