Back in August, we shared a Bay Area Proud story with a mystery at its heart. It began not in California, but in New Jersey, with a woman named Wendi Shaw and her unusual passion: collecting old letters.

Wendi scours thrift stores and online marketplaces for bundles of handwritten correspondence, often love letters exchanged during wartime. For her, these letters are more than paper and ink; they’re history lessons wrapped in romance.

“It’s better than any fake romantic story you could ever read,” she says. “The longing, the emotion, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

Wendi’s hobby doesn’t stop at reading. She makes it her mission to reunite these letters with the families they belong to, using genealogy sites and social media to track down descendants. Her success rate was impressiv

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