A 1929 letter found its family after 95 years

Michael Archer was gutting the last unrenovated closet in his London, Ontario home when a yellow letter fell into the rubble. It was dated August 13, 1929, and signed by Charles Slater, a man who worked Great Lakes freighters. Slater had written to his father from the twin cities that later became Thunder Bay, explaining he did not know when he would get home. "There's no grain coming out of the west," he wrote. That was two months before the stock market crash. The Archers tried to find Slater's family and got nowhere, so Christina Archer stored the letter for 25 years. Last week she posted about it online. Marisa Cooper, a local genealogist, was scrolling Facebook and saw it. Working backward through half-siblings and marriages, she found great-nephew Aaron Powers, who had never heard of his relative. "Oh my gosh, it's the long-lost uncle we've always wanted," his wife Laurie recalled him saying. Slater died in 1984, having recommended his father read All Quiet on the Western Front.