Ky. boy, teacher work to reunite Tennessee family with WWI-era keepsakes

RUSSELL, Ky. — A curious child in Kentucky who couldn’t resist opening a dusty wooden box is responsible, with a little help from his teacher, for reuniting a collection of vintage pictures and letters with a member of the family that left it behind.

The cedar box, about the size of a lunchbox, contained photos dating to World War I, letters from two generations, postcards sent from Europe a century ago and documents including a birth certificate.

John Blevins, a sixth-grader at Russell Middle School in Russell, Kentucky, remembers rooting around in a kitchen cabinet last year and seeing the box in the back corner of the middle shelf.

Considering it was the cabinet where his mother stores items like plastic spoons and cups, the box seemed out of place. Blevins spied the corner of an envelope sticking out and wanted to get a closer look at the cool air-mail stamp on it.

The letters span two generations, and include love letters from a soldier to his wife.

One envelope contains financial documents showing that in 1927 they paid off a $570.72 loan on a Chandler automobile.

There are pictures of entire families, laughing babies, World War I soldiers and serious looking children with dirty faces.

Postcards from a soldier in Belgium to his wife are illustrated in hand-crafted embroidery, a bit frayed but the colors almost as fresh as when they were mailed in 1918 — just under a century ago.

Blevins rummaged through the letters and pictures, wondering if they pertained to his family, though his mother checked the names and told him no.

Blevins put everything back in the box. He could see they were delicate and didn’t want to damage them. “They needed to be preserved in their original shape,” he said.

The next day, he took the box to school and showed his find to his then social studies teacher. Ultimately, Blevins took the box back home and went on with his life until a week ago, when his social studies class started a unit on World War II, and he remembered some of the documents in the box dated back to that era.

He had misplaced the box, but eventually found it in the basement. He took it to school and showed it to this year’s social studies teacher, Holly Ross, who was intrigued enough to pore through the materials and jot down some notes — including the names of the family.

A web search turned up clues, including an obituary that led her to a descendant of the family, a woman living 350 miles away in Tennessee.

Ross and Blevins are currently making arrangements to return the materials.

Blevins isn’t sure how the documents came into his family’s possession, but he did find out that they were in the cabinet because his mother put them there after retrieving them. The box’s contents, along with other items, were retrieved from his late great-grandfather’s house while cleaning up following a flood.

But how did they get there? Blevins knows his great-grandfather had helped clean out another house in the area — he doesn’t know when — and theorizes maybe his great-grandfather kept the box for safekeeping and never got around to finding its rightful owners.

He and Ross know the family had not lived in the area for a long time, but the documents show they’d lived in the Ashland, Kentucky, and Ironton, Ohio, areas. Some of the letters are addressed to Wilgus, which is in rural Lawrence County, Ohio.

James writes for the Ashland, Kentucky Independent.