The 100-Year Journey
When Brittany Keech checked her mailbox one morning, she shuffled through a pile of the usual junk mail. Yet this time amidst the bills and flyers, she spotted something curious: a tattered postcard that seemed to whisper of another era.
The postcard carried a faded green one-cent George Washington stamp, was postmarked October 29, 1920, and arrived in Brittany’s mailbox on September 8, 2020 -- 100 years later.
It was a Halloween postcard, with a black cat with an arched back, pumpkins peering through curling vines, an owl perched on a broomstick, and a witch mid-flight. Across the top, the words read, “Witch would you rather be a goose or a pumpkin-head?”
On the reverse, Keech read looping cursive addressed to “Mrs. Roy McQueen.” The message read as follows: “Dear cousins, we are quite well but mother has awful lame knees. It is awful cold here. Don’t forget to write us. PS: Did Roy get his pants fixed yet?” And it was signed, “Flossie Burgess.”
Driven by curiosity, Keech posted a photo of the postcard to “Positively Belding,” the local Facebook page celebrating good news in her Michigan community. “I thought, someone out there might know this family,” she said. Within hours, neighbors chimed in, eager to solve the mystery.
Among them was Robby Peters of Grand Rapids, who works at the public library and pursues genealogy as a hobby. “I started helping my own family, and I kind of caught the bug after that,” he said. With census records in hand, he traced a Roy McQueen to Keech's home address.
“I found census records, death records, and marriage records,” Robby recounted, and the trail led to Nora Murdock, Roy’s wife, and her sister’s daughter: Flossie Burgess.
Sheryl Ackerman of Grand Rapids also joined the fun: “I love trying to solve mysteries,” she said, and she successfully located a living grandniece of Roy and Nora McQueen. Ackerman reached out to this distant relative, and soon Keech was arranging a meeting to return the precious heirloom.
A hundred years melted away in that meeting, yet the postcard’s journey remained partly unexplained. Mindy Ponover of the USPS surmised it may have slipped behind a floorboard or lodged in old post-office machinery. “There’s a very good possibility of that,” she said, noting how mail sometimes resurfaces after renovations.
Ponover explained how undeliverable letters go to the Dead Letter Office “where they try to find family members and where the letter should go.” In most cases, she said, “Mail that had been lost in our network and later found” is rare -- making Keech's discovery all the more remarkable.
God delights in delightful surprises, Friends -- weaving His love and care through even the most ordinary moments. Just as a timeworn 100-year-old card showed up in Keech's mailbox, God often drops unexpected blessings into our lives when we least expect them, reminding us that He is always at work, even behind the scenes of everyday routine.
Where is our Creator showing Himself in unexpected ways in your life this week?