Several years ago, my mom received a letter from a woman in Ireland named Gerdy (I have no idea if I've spelled that correctly) that was addressed to mom's dad. His name was Ed. Gerdy turned out to be a distant relative who was looking for Ed. He immigrated to the United States in the 1930's and she hadn't seen him since. I told you a little about his immigration in this post.
Unfortunately my grandpa Ed died in 1978, so my mom wrote back to Gerdy to inform her. Over the next several years Gerdy and Mom traded letters, filling each other in on the details of life. I'm not sure how close they became since I haven't read the letters, but I loved that fact that they were in fact trading letters. They never took their correspondence to email, presumably because neither uses email.
Last year, Gerdy wrote to tell Mom that she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn't go into detail, but Mom feared the worst. Last year at Christmas, Mom sent Gerdy a letter and never heard back from her, which caused Mom to really fear the worst. One of my family members recently visited Ireland to meet relatives he'd never met, to take photos, and to document everything he could. Turns out that Gerdy died before Christmas last year.
Her husband is still alive and Mom plans to begin writing to him, which I think is a pretty cool thing to do. A couple of days ago I told Mom that she needs to get her letters from Gerdy into an album of some sort because she's in possession of family heritage that can never be replaced. She's promised that she'll do so. I'm thinking that I might be following up at some point just to make sure.
