Ancestry Magazine

Initially, the genealogist in me scoured the letters for clues. But the yellowed letters included little of genealogical value. Aside from pleading for news about the family, whose names I already knew, Uncle Edwin’s letters were filled with little more than cheerful trivia. He teased his beloved sister and pleaded for more of her homemade cake. He occasionally mentioned encounters with the enemy and, ominously, that gas masks had been distributed one day.

When the let ters came into my possession, I plied my aunt, Uncle Edwin’s only surviving sister, with questions about her brother. She knew that after the war Edwin married his sweetheart, but, tragically, he died when his only daughter, my cousin, was just an infant—a result of gas poisoning that he suffered during the war.

The sadness didn’t end there. My aunt said that Edwin’s wife and my cousin had died in an accident just a few years before. My aunt knew my cousin’s married name, that she had lived in New Jersey, and that she had left three sons.

Years passed and I was too involved with raising my own family to think more about the letters, but on the fiftieth anniversary of my grandfather’s death, the notes from my aunt’s conversation mysteriously slipped out of a book I hadn’t seen in a long time. The notes included my cousin’s long-forgotten married name. It was the prompting I needed to search for her children—Edwin’s grandsons. I decided that they, not I, should have these gifts from their past.

A search of online phone directories led to five listings in New Jersey with my cousin’s last name. I picked up the phone, called the first number, and told the woman who answered about the letters and how I wanted my cousin’s and uncle’s heirs to have them.

The woman sounded skeptical, asking questions about the family I was seeking. Even the feeling of joy I felt when she told me that I had the right family was quickly dashed when she told me that her husband—my cousin’s former husband, the one person who would remember my family—had died just weeks before. She mentioned that one of her stepsons might be interested in the letters, and, while she wouldn’t give me his number, she promised to pass along mine.

Within minutes my the phone rang. It was my cousin’s son, Bob. Bob thought his grandfather was an only child. “He had sisters?” he asked.

Bob said he had just been wishing he knew more about his family. He had only a grainy photo of his grandfather—my Uncle Edwin—and a small metal box that had been his. He said he would be thrilled to see the letters, and, within a week of our phone meeting, I hand delivered Uncle Edwin’s original letters to his grandson.

Not long ago, I received an e-mail from Bob. “Have I ever told you how grateful I am?” he wrote. “You gave me so much more than words on paper. You gave me my grandfather. And better still, you gave him to me as young man, a boy really. Even with the horror that must surely have been the backdrop in France, the trenches, the gas that would someday kill, he is there in the letters—a loving brother so clearly holding back to spare his sister pain and worry!”

Bob ended his message with a thought that made me know what an important link the letters had become: “I never got to meet him, have a chance to know my grandfather as most boys do. He would have been fifty-four the year I was born. But I know him in letters, and my son will know him too! ”

Nearly ninety years after they were written, these letters of a young man continue to link generations and warm hearts. And that’s the great thing about genealogy—it’s anything but self-serving. Even in those moments when it seems no one else understands our drive to find our pasts, we need to remember that what we’re doing can make a difference. For the relative who never chooses to uncover the roots and branches of his or her own family tree, our work can open up windows to our mutual pasts and connected futures. That may be one of the greatest gifts a genealogist can ever offer.