Michigan Woman Receives a 100-Year-Old Letter With Halloween Drawings in Her Mailbox
A Michigan woman got the surprise of her life when she opened her mailbox to find a 100-year-old postcard. Brittany Keech was not expecting anything out of the ordinary when she opened her mailbox one fine morning in 2020, The Independent reported.
Amidst the usual junk, her eyes went to a tattered and timeworn postcard. On a closer look, she discovered that the letter was postmarked October 29, 1920. Almost a century ago, this letter began its journey ending in Keech's mailbox. Unfortunately, the postcard was still not in the hands of its intended receiver, something which Keech wanted to rectify.
A 100-Year-Old Postcard
The postcard arrived in Keech's mailbox on September 8, 2020, TODAY reported. It was postmarked with the date October 29, 1920. The letter was addressed to one Roy McQueen, with a one-cent George Washington stamp. This was not the first time Keech had received something addressed to previous occupants, but the fact that the mail was 100 years old caught her eye.
"I was honestly surprised," she shared. "I didn't think I could read it first, but I knew that it looked old. So then when I started looking at it closer, when I had more than half a second to look at it, I noticed that it was a really old letter dated back to 1920. It was addressed to my address, but it wasn't addressed to me."
Contents of the Postcard
The front of the postcard carried a Halloween illustration, containing a black cat, pumpkins, a witch, an owl, and a broomstick, TODAY reported. There was also a message, that read, "Witch would you rather be... a goose or a pumpkin-head?" Keech while deciphering the message in the letter realized that it was sent from one family member to another. The letter started with "Dear Cousins, we are quite well but mother has awful lame knees. It is awful cold here." The note ended with a reminder, "Don't forget to write us," followed by a query about whether McQueen had fixed his pants yet.
Search for McQueen's family
Considering that the letter was written 100 years ago, Keech understood very well that finding McQueen on the earthly plane was not a viable option, TODAY reported. Hence she focussed her efforts on finding his descendants. Her first step was sharing a post about the find on a page named "Positively Belding."
"I know a lot of people here in Belding have lived here for a long time... or their family has lived here and they just come back to their roots," she said. "So I knew 'Positively Belding' would give me a little bit of other than me just starting to look into it myself." Soon many people joined her pursuit of finding McQueen's family. Robby Peters and Sheryl Ackerman from Grand Rapids got interested in the mystery and put all of their genealogy knowledge in trying to find out about McQueen's eventual fate, The Independent reported.
The Search for Roy McQueen's Relatives
Peters went through a 1920 census and discovered that a Roy McQueen did live at the address where Keech resided, The Independent reported. He further found that McQueen was married to one Nora Murdock. Peters believes that the letter was sent by Murdock's niece Florence "Flossie" Burgess.
"I built a family tree," he continued. "It doesn't look like Roy and Nora had children, and Flossie seems to have remained unmarried, so there are no direct descendants." Ackerman found the same results but did manage to track one relative, the grandniece of McQueen and Murdock.
"I've been speaking with the possible relative and she is very interested in having the postcard," Keech said. "We're talking about setting up a time to meet at some point."
As for the mystery of how the letter was delivered 100 years later, a postal worker believes it could be because of renovation. Mindy Ponover, who works for the Postal Service in Michigan thinks that the postcard could have gotten lost in the machinery of an old post office and might have been recovered after a recent renovation. And then, it was delivered to the mentioned address.