A home renovation led to quite the discovery this month.
Melissa Fahy was renovating her new home in Westfield, New Jersey, when she and her father found a letter underneath the attic stairs, NBC News reports.
The letter was written by a woman named Virginia, postmarked in May 1945 and addressed to her husband, Rolf Christoffersen, who was a sailor in the Norwegian Navy.
But the note never reached its destination, and was returned to sender.
At some point, the envelope slipped through the cracks between the attic stairs where it was lost for decades.
Fahy told NBC News she was so touched by the writing that she worked to track down the family. Two hours later, she found Christoffersen’s son, who was able to read it to his 96-year-old father. His mother died six years ago this weekend.
The story is somewhat similar to a long lost love letter that was reunited with its writer in 2015. Ilene Ortiz found a love letter in a vinyl record album she bought at a thrift shop in Westminster, Colorado. She asked a local news station to help her find the writer, which led her to Bill Moore of Aurora, Colorado. Moore served in Patton’s Third Army when he was 20 years old, and he wrote the letter to the woman he would return home to marry.
