Revisiting Jean’s Letters

As I was growing up, I developed a pen pal relationship with my first cousin in Des Moines. I grew up on a farm in Northwest Missouri, and it was always tremendous fun to go to the big city of Des Moines, where my mother was from, to visit her mother and sisters there. And for me one of the most delightful parts was visiting my cousins. We would tell open-ended stories when we were trying to fall asleep at night with each one of us contributing the next sentence.

My cousin Jean was three years older than me, and therefore much wiser, so I looked up to her a great deal. At some point we decided to write to each other. She was a good pen pal, keeping the correspondence coming. She would often close with “P.S. Linda (her sister) still loves Buster (my brother)” and I replied with the opposite.  Who knows why?

I saved her letters, not realizing that one day they would be treasures. She wrote about things happening around her with sweet comments expressing her positive take on life. It was devastating when she died from a cancer illness after two years of college, at age 20.

For years the letters sat among my cherished possessions and life kept me so busy that I did not take the time to read them again. But something happened that prompted me to get them out again. I began reading and could not stop until I had gone through every single one. Oh, my! As I looked back on the history of those letters written 60 years ago, I could see the tremendous impact of her influence on my life in so many little ways and it touched me deeply.

The “something” was Claudia, one of Jean’s best friends from Des Moines, who was now living in California and came to research at the Midwest Genealogy Center. We had never met, nor knew the other existed.  We somehow amazingly figured out our connection with Jean, now 60 years after the fact, and it prompted me to look over the letters again. I determined I would digitize them in our Memory Lab here at MGC. I invited Claudia to be here for the process while she was in town. It was incredible to hear her memories as she read the letters one by one while I scanned them.

In her letters, Jean mirthfully mentioned her mom getting a traffic ticket, which made me snicker. She discussed skating parties during the winter and youth activities at church, which Claudia embellished with her own memories of the same events. Jean talked about how exciting it was that our older cousin Jane was going off to college. She wrote about getting foreign pen pals, which was the encouragement for me to write to soldiers during the Vietnam War. I now clearly saw the older-cousin-shepherding she unknowingly did via these letters, which helped set me forward in my life’s journey in many positive ways and became part of my history.

Perhaps you have letters, documents, or A/V that you would like to preserve or make sharable digitally. You can do it for free in our Memory Lab here at the Midwest Genealogy Center. Just sign up! Click on this link: https://www.mymcpl.org/genealogy/about-mgc/memory-lab

Hopefully, as for me, your priceless family items will be added to the stories retained of those cherished family members who have gone on before.

Twila R.
Midwest Genealogy Center