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Last fall, when I was in Denver for a family funeral, one of my cousins offered me a cache of old family letters and documents that she had come across cleaning out my aunt’s estate.

My passion is family history, so I was eager to get the letters, which dated back to 1865, and thrilled when my cousin said there were more letters, which she would mail to me when she found the time.

Months passed, and no letters came. I know how difficult dispositioning an estate can be, so I didn’t have the heart to pester my cousin about the additional letters.

What a surprise when a woman in Modesto, Calif., contacted me this spring to let me know she had a collection of letters from my family. She had tracked me down through various cousins to see if I was interested in having the letters.

As it turned out, these were the letters from my aunt’s attic! My cousin had been so involved in closing out the estate she had forgotten about them, and they were in the house when the final estate sale took place. Somehow, no one is sure how, the letters ended up on eBay and were purchased by the woman in Modesto, who is named Edie.

Edie’s hobby is history, and after she had read the old letters she wanted to give them back. After we spoke, she mailed me two huge cartons of letters.

They turned out to be every letter my parents had written to my father’s parents in Denver, dating from the 1940s to the 1980s. They were especially interesting because, as a career military officer, my father wrote letters from his deployments: Europe during World War II, Korea in 1952-53 and Vietnam in the mid-’60s.

In between his two deployments to Europe in the ’40s, Dad was stationed at Ft. Bragg, where he met my mother, a North Carolina girl, Mary Thorp Cope.

Her letters provide an interesting perspective on how a small-town girl from Hamlet adjusted to living in various parts of the world.

Both of my parents died a few years ago, and there were many questions I wish I had asked them before they died. 

Unbelievably, the letters answer some of these questions and provide a diary of the activities of my family from before I was born until after I had left for college.

The letters are priceless to me. It is almost a miracle that I ended up with them, and Edie is one in a million.

— Anne Cope Mueller, Greensboro