Woman Finds Hidden Love Letters From WWII During NYC Home Renovation

You never quite know what will happen when you do a home renovation. Sometimes things go smoothly without much of an issue, but at other times, you may uncover a piece of history that had long since been forgotten.

In most cases, the history that is uncovered when making home improvements is old wallpaper or perhaps some long-forgotten tile. For one home that was redone in Staten Island, however, it was a stack of love letters dating from World War II.

According to Fox News, after Dottie Kearney found the letters, they were returned to the descendants of the man who wrote them. He was a Navy man who frequently wrote to his wife and used very touching words when doing so.

After Kearney and her husband purchased the home in the mid-1990s, they began tearing our walls. It was then that they started discovering the letters.

According to the New York Post, she talked about how Claude, who wrote the letters, was always polite. She said: “He always wrote ‘My dearest’ to her and said how hard the war was, how he was longing for her, wanted her home cooking, and thought of her every day.”

Kearney was taken by the letters and found that she read them frequently through the years. She said she couldn’t bear to throw them away because they were beautiful. She also told her husband that they would find the owners one day.

It took a couple of decades, but Kearney eventually reunited the letters with the writer’s descendants. When she watched The Kelly Clarkson Show, she saw heirloom investigator Chelsea Brown and reached out to her on social media.

Brown often helps to bring together lost and found items from WWII and Holocaust artifacts. Working with My Heritage, it took her only a short time to find the census data from 1940, and she found Claude’s daughter, Carol Bohlin. The 76-year-old was living in Vermont at the time. She said that the family was beyond grateful.

Not everything is known about the courtship between Claude and Marie. It is known that before and after WWII, he was a police officer with the NYPD. Bohlin also thinks that they had honeymooned after being wed in New Mexico, and then Claude joined the Navy. He was in the South Pacific from 1941-1945.

Marie wanted to be closer to her husband, so she relocated to California. Claude would often talk about some of the everyday events that took place on the front.

Not only did he love his wife, but he also wanted to make sure she was okay. Marie had rheumatic fever when she was 12 and had a weak heart. She ended up passing away in 1961.

Claude and Marie had returned to New York in 1949, moving into the two-bedroom home where the letters were hidden in the attic. Claude died in 1974, and Bohlin relocated to Vermont.

She is happy to have the letters because they remind her of the childhood that she treasured with her parents. According to the New York Post, she said: “It brought me back – I miss them and I cry a lot sometimes when I think about them,” she said. “It made me feel like they’re here again.”