Connections to the past

Let me tell you  story...

Once upon a time a family cleaned out their relatives house and sold off household items to a second hand dealer. Among those things were a box of old letters. Figuring they might be worth something to someone- the dealer put them in his shop for sale.

One day a man came along and saw this box of old letters and being interested in history, purchased them. When this man read over the letters , he discovered he had a connection to certain areas mentioned in the letters, namely Macksville on the mid north coast in NSW and decided to transcribe the letters and post them on the internet with the hopes the information might someday come in handy for family tree searching family members of the letter's authors. Well, years went by and there was very little contact made regarding the letters until one day...

An Author, living in Macksville was given an old newspaper article which reported a terrible tragedy which happened just after WW1 on the outskirts of town. Something about the story niggled away at her until she decided she had to write the story into a novel. Becoming obsessed by both her real life characters she'd based her story on as well as the fictional ones, she scoured the internet for more information. During her research on the internet, she was directed to a web page that happened to have photocopies of letters written by the very man she was writing a story about, written from the trenches in France during WW1.

 
As you may have guessed-- I'm the lucky author who stumbled upon this website and letters--letters that gave me a connection to a man I was rapidly becoming obsessed about! I couldn't even begin to imagine how significant this was--there were letters, pieces of paper that were held by this man--written by him in trenches while bombs and gunfire and men died all about him. The scope of this still boggles my mind and gives me goosebumps!

After sending a letter that I am still to this day rather embarrassed about as I rambled and stammered and sounded all together far too insane to be  taken seriously- My hero Graeme, generously allowed me to purchase his box of letters, fulfilling a dream that had suddenly become so very important to me.

It's very hard to explain this connection I have to my WW1 veteran. It's not something I can easily put in words, but to now hold those letters written by him to his family during such a tumultuous time in our history, it humbles me to now be the guardian of a small piece of amazing history.

Hopefully this book will be out next year and I'll be able to share with you the characters and the background in more detail and hope that you'll understand just how special this story has become to me.