The story of Aunt Kathryn will be told a little differently than my other family history blog posts because I think the story of how I “rediscovered” a relative, and in turn a completely new side of my family, is as interesting as the woman whose story I’m telling.
The Letters – June 2004
I stared at the envelope, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar name in the upper left hand corner, K.M. Lorenz. Who is that?
Among the names I’d become so familiar with during the decades of researching my family’s history, Lorenz hadn’t popped up once. The postmark from Remsen, Iowa didn’t ring any bells, either.
Yet, this person and this town were somehow connected to my family, because the letter was sent to my great grandparents, Lou and Mabel Winney, who lived in Montebello, California when the letter was written in March of 1920.
My grandma on my mom’s side, Patricia Winney Berger Fangmeyer, had passed away in April of 2004. She was also interested in preserving our family history for generations that followed. Some of the treasures that grandma passed down to my mom were original family letters written in the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.
One was written by Dr. Henry Kirkpatrick to his granddaughter, Cassie Kirkpatrick, when she was a young girl traveling with her family in covered horse-drawn wagons on the Oregon Trail in 1864. Many were written in the 1880s by a lonely Ella Owens to her grandmother, Grandma Newhouse, and her uncle Jimmy Newhouse. My personal favorites are the love letters that Lou Winney and Mabel Wallberg had written to each other in the fall of 1919 while they were waiting for Lou to be discharged from the Marines after World War I.
Knowing I would be thrilled to add these to my collection of family memorabilia, my mom passed them on to me for safekeeping and documenting for the family. I skimmed through the letters when I scanned the originals, saving deeper reading for a later date.
Life took over before I could scan all of the letters. I was working full time, my son was in elementary school, and my husband traveled a lot for business. Not exactly the time to add more to my plate. Before I tucked them in archival sleeves and set them aside, I checked the end of the letter from K.M. Lorenz, hoping he or she had signed their name. In tidy script, K.M. signed the letter to Lou and Mabel, “With love to both, Aunt Kathryn.”
I was intrigued by the unexpected appearance of this aunt Kathryn, but had no time to devote to finding out more. I had no idea that it would be another fourteen years before I looked at them again and another year more before I would solve this mystery.
The Women Who Gave Us a Legacy of Strength 